What Are We to Do?

    If you want to be slim and vigorous, you can't eat as I've described. But you can eat the
natural, healthy unrefined animal and vegetable foods that people ate and grew robust on in
centuries past. Nor do you have to eat like a rabbit; you can eat like a human being. You can
enjoy fish, lamb, steak and lobster, nuts and berries, cheese, eggs and butter along with a
wonderful variety of salad greens and other vegetables.
In fact, in the ten years since the first edition of this book was published, one of my personalwishes has been granted. Today, a person choosing to follow a controlled carbohydratenutritional approach has almost as many packaged and prepared food options as people who are,unwittingly, following a low-fat diet. Visit your local natural food store, drug store, supermarketor even mass market store and you will see the wide variety of food products available tosomeone who understands the benefits of controlled carbohydrate nutrition. Advances inscientific understanding have paved the way for alternatives to foods that are high incarbohydrates, foods such as pasta, bread, muffins, cakes, candy and even ice cream, not tomention the wide variety of energy bars and ready-to-drink shakes.
    On all four phases of Atkins, you select from an increasingly liberal array of foods that aresources of the healthy carbohydrates. Your overall intake of them also gradually increases. Onceyou've reached your goal weight, you can eat larger helpings of healthy carbohydrate foods, aslong as you stay below the Critical Carbohydrate Level for Maintenance (CCLM), which will beexplained in Chapters 16 and 17. In simple terms, this means knowing and adhering to athreshold of carbohydrate intake that allows you to neither gain nor lose weight. It's worthmentioning that each person has an individual threshold depending upon age, level of physicalactivity and other factors.
    Common sense dictates that when a lot of people try the same answer to the same problem andmost of them fail, there's something wrong with their solution. You may have tried a low-fat diet.I'm sure you've seen other people try one. After a promising start, they often end up as failures. Only people with remarkable self-discipline or those who really don't get pleasure from eatingare likely to succeed on low-fat diets. Atkins represents a completely different way.
    When you do Atkins, you eliminate virtually all refined sugar and flour and processed foods.Instead, you're in an alliance with Mother Nature, who really did provide for us very well. Youbought this book to lose weight, and I'm going to have to make you healthier, too. When doingAtkins, you couldn't separate those results, even if you wanted to.

KEY POINTS!

• It is not true that the only way to lose weight is to limit your intake of calories.
• When you control carbohydrate consumption sufficiently, your body will switch fromburning glucose, derived from carbohydrate, to burning primarily fat as its energy source.
• You burn more calories when your body is operating on a fat metabolism.
• Atkins has repeatedly been proven to take off more fat than other weight loss programswhen an equal number of calories is consumed.
• By drastically increasing the intake of carbohydrate, the American diet has changeddramatically in the past sixty years.
• In the past twenty years the incidence of lifestyle-related diseases such as obesity,diabetes and heart disease has increased by leaps and bounds.
  
  

A FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION:

Is it true that the Atkins Nutritional Approach is really just another low-calorie diet?
Some people think this, but it's not true. Atkins isn't about counting calories. Those who aredoing Atkins may be eating fewer calories as a result of being less hungry and less obsessed withfood.
    This occurs for two reasons:

1. Stable blood sugar throughout the day ensures that you will have fewer food cravings orfalse hunger pains.
2. The food eaten by a person doing Atkins (meat, fish, cheese, nuts, eggs, low-sugar/low-starchvegetables and fruit) is less processed and more nutritious than the typical pre-Atkinsmenu. Give a body fewer empty calories, provide it with more nutrient-densealternatives, and the body will logically be satisfied sooner and require less food.
   

• Eliminate from your kitchen sugar and all products that contain sugar.
• When grocery shopping, stick to the aisles on the perimeters of the store. The centeraisles are where the junk food and processed food lurk.
• Look for-and purchase-the ever-increasing selection of controlled carbohydrate foodalternatives to low-fat, high-sugar foods.
• Use a carbohydrate gram counter-such as the one bound into this book-to count carbs.
• Even if you are not trying to lose weight, avoid the typical high-carb breakfast choicessuch as toast, muffins, bagels and cereal.