The Atkins Diet -sometimes mistakenly spelled as Adkins Diet- is a long standing diet that has been around since the 1970's. It didn't reach its peak until many years later. Each year this diet has grown in popularity until 2004, when the diet industry became less enthousiastic about it. Just as thousands of new low carb products hit the shelf, and even entire low carb specialty stores, began to franchise across the country, the low carb trend took a serious turn for the worse. It wasn't because the diet was bad, it was because the merchandising of hundreds of companies trying to get their piece of the billion dollar diet industry.

Atkins has some good low carb products, meant to be used in moderation. As soon they were introduced, thousands of other low carb diet products hit the shelves, and most of them either tasted bad, had gastrointestinal side effects, had too many calories, chemicals or trans-fats. Even with waning popularity, the low carb diet is still very widely used and successful, especially the Atkins Diet.

Unfortunately, the Atkins Diet has a tarnished reputation for being a fatty, artery clogging diet. The Atkins Camp is trying to change this reputation. The Atkins Nutritional Approach is their current motto. This certainly sounds more conservative than the Atkins Diet Revolution of the past. There are many myths about this plan, but we're going to lay it out for you. The biggest misconception of the Atkins Diet is that it is an endless buffet of cheese, steaks and cream. That isn't so. We'll start with the first and most misunderstood phase of the diet: Induction.

Induction is a 2-week plan that gets your body into ketosis. Ketosis is a fat burning phase that your body goes through when it is depleted of ample carbohydrates. You'll check your urine with dipsticks in order to measure ketones. You do need to eat plenty of fat during induction in order to get into ketosis. It is possible to lose a substantial amount of weight during Induction, so it is tempting to stretch this phase out for an extended period of time. You should avoid the temptation to stay on Induction for too long, and move along as the diet instructs. You'll read more about that below. For now, you need to know that you are allowed 20 net carbs per day. A net carb is a whole carb gram, minus any fiber grams or sugar alcohol grams.

It is true that The Atkins Diet is a high fat plan, particularly during induction, but certain fats are indeed limited. With meat, fats are limited by default. Bacon, hot dogs, deli meat, etc are to be limited if they are cured with sugar (carbs) or nitrites (carcinogen). Cheese is limited to 3-4 ounces a day. There goes the all day bunless bacon cheeseburger myth. Trans fats are to be avoided and The Atkins Diet strongly recommends olive oil, foods containing Omega-3 oils, cold pressed oils, and butter instead of margarine. Fresh/whole meat is virtually unlmited, with the exception of organ meats, oysters and mussels.

[Continue to part two of the Atkins Diet review]