Since its launch, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution has sold millions of copies. The promise of rapid weight loss without having to suffer from the usual low-fat, low-calorie, low-flavor diet that overweight people were used to generated wide appeal. However, that appeal wouldn’t have lasted through the years if the diet hadn’t worked. The fact is that the Atkins diet works. However, how and why it works is not as magical as it seems.
Atkins Diet History: Millions of Dieters Say It Works and Lose Hundreds of Pounds
When Dr. Atkins’ book first hit bookstores across the country, many people bought it. It seemed that any new fad diet that came along made a million desperate people try it. Unfortunately, most diets didn’t work. Fad diets had a way of creating yo-yo dieters who lost a lot of weight at first, then regained it again once they stopped the extreme diet regimen they had been prescribed. But there was something different about the Atkins diet. It worked; and it kept working. People who had never been able to lose weight before were suddenly losing ten, twenty, or even a hundred pounds, all thanks to the Atkins diet.
The Atkins Diet created a whole new industry. Generated thousands of Atkins diet foods, Atkins cookbooks, guides, and more. Legions of Atkins followers seeking carb-free meals even changed the restaurant industry. Everything from fast food places to chain restaurants to fine dining establishments began offering low-carb or no-carb meals to meet the demands of diners who grew tired of ordering their burger without a bun.
The diet created by Dr. Atkins also generated a lot of controversy. Nutritionists claimed that it was difficult or impossible to obtain the required daily nutrition from the diet prescribed by Doctor Atkins. Cardiologists and medical researchers worried that large waves of Americans eating even more red meat were a recipe for heart disease, high cholesterol, and heart attacks. There were even rumors that Atkins himself became fatter and less healthy until he was extremely obese at the time of his death.
Despite these urgent and sometimes exaggerated warnings, people continued to use the Atkins diet and its low-carb derivatives like the Zone Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, and the South Beach Diet, for one simple reason: the diet worked, and the diet worked. people lost weight.
How Atkins Works – Why Low Carb Diets Lose Weight When Nothing Else Works
The most amazing thing about the Atkins diet was its success rate. People who had never been able to lose weight before were able to lose pounds like water. Even people who weren’t overweight could use Atkins to lose those last 5 or 10 pounds. Even Hollywood celebrities began to admit that they were using the Atkins diet and then other forms of low-carb or no-carb diets.
What makes low carb diets so powerful as weight loss tools?
Is there some internal biology at work as its authors claim? Is there really any truth to the fact that people in Mediterranean areas are rarely obese despite eating a very high-fat diet? Has science been wrong before? Was there a national conspiracy to force people to eat boring, healthy food?
Whether any of the above is true is open to significant debate. Ironically, none of them have anything to do with why Atkins works and why all other low-carb diets work.
Low Carb Diets The Latest Marketing Twist
If a low carb diet is not a biologically superior way of eating, then why do people who use the Atkins diet or the South Beach diet or the Zone diet lose so much weight?
In a word, marketing. Or, to be more specific, very clever twists and turns.
All diets before Atkins suffered from the same thing, telling people what NOT to eat. Where the Atkins diet was able to succeed was that he turned this paradigm on its head. Instead of telling people what he couldn’t eat, he told them what they COULD eat, and told them they could have bacon.
If you’ve ever talked to someone who was on the Atkins diet, they all inevitably told you the same thing. They said that with this new diet they were on, they could eat bacon! It was as if they were quoting the book. They may have mentioned other foods that you might eat as well, foods like fried chicken, dumplings, and all sorts of tasty foods that had been banned before. Then at the end, as if it were an afterthought, they said the only thing they couldn’t eat was carbs.
Ironically, the reason low-carb diets like Atkins are so successful is that cutting out carbs actually has the effect of cutting out all the very things that are off-limits to a regular diet. It just makes it in a much nicer way, and then they throw dieters a bone: don’t worry, you can still have bacon.
Most diets are too strict. They try to eliminate all foods that could somehow lead to weight gain, no matter how small the contributing factor. The fact is that few overweight people are obese because they eat too much steak or too much chicken. They are overweight because they eat too many chips, candy, donuts, muffins, and desserts, all of which are clearly prohibited on regular diets AND low-carb diets.
It turns out that virtually all of those overconsumed empty-calorie foods that have made Americans the fattest nation on the planet have one simple thing in common: They are all high in carbohydrates. That’s not surprising considering that sugar has carbs. Goodbye sweets. Also high in carbs are those empty-calorie snacks and snacks that everyone forgets when counting calories—things like breadsticks, rolls, and even those low-nutritional-value starches like potatoes and rice.
In the end, the Atkins diet was not a new revolution after all. It was the same advice fat people always got. All that changed was the wording. Instead of being told to eliminate candy, desserts, sodas, juices, coffee creamer, muffins, donuts, etc., the “new revolution” told them the exact same thing, but with one sentence which sounded more scientific: “Eliminate carbs.” .”
The only real difference is that the New Atkins Diet Revolution did not go overboard by also trying to ban other things that could be harmful to the diet, such as bacon, beef, and pork. This was the genius behind the low carb diet. It turns out that things like meat are self-regulating. It’s just not desirable to eat 5 steaks, even if you can. But, all those “sneaky” things that keep people fat when they try so hard to lose weight get caught up in the “carb stuff” web.
Instead of having to tell people to look at the fine print on the label and avoid foods with high fructose corn syrup, he only had to look at the bold numbers at the top of the nutrition facts label legally. required. Since high fructose corn syrup is high in carbohydrates, the foods it’s in are automatically eliminated. Same goes for sneaky diet busters like fruit juices (healthy, but only in smaller amounts), bagels (just because someone brought them to the meeting doesn’t mean they don’t count), butter (carbs, carbs, carbs). , and even many of those fats that nutritionists worry about (olive oil has no carbs, but most frying oils have tons).
In the end, the secret to the diet’s success seems to be simplicity. No points, no calculators, no long lists of do’s and don’ts, just a simple line to guide dieters to weight loss. Don’t eat carbs.
