Jess was ranting about Atkins on her blog and my comment became so long I decided to post it here instead.
As much as I agree that Atkins is a fad diet, and that you certainly cannot maintain it over long periods, tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people are successfully shedding a lot of weight on it, so there must be something to it.
Atkins is a “running-start” diet for the typical American fatty — they’re fat because they eat carbs constantly. Look at the typical American diet: Sugar, french fries, sugar, white bread, sugar, a bit of meat. What Atkins does is slap the fatty in the face and point out the major problem in their diet. No, not the only one, but the major one. And because it’s so strict with restricting the intake of it, it drives the point home, just as Body For Life drove home a good (but balanced) diet to me.
And it’s an easy diet for the fatty to go on.
Is Atkins perfect? Hell no. Everyone should do Body For Life because it’s healthier, works better, and can be sustained. But if the choice is between Atkins or some other ridiculous fad diet that *doesn’t* work (”shed pounds on the pickles and cola diet!”), I’ll gladly applaud anyone choosing Atkins to lose weight. But after you lose that weight and gain some discipline, I definitely recommend moving on to an even healthier lifestyle.
I sort of disagree… BFL *is* a great way to go - but I suspect a pickles and coke diet would work like a charm if you could stick to it. If you search around a bit you can find studies that show that an atkins diet is , relative to the pre-atkins intake of users, a low calorie diet. So it works the same way as any low calorie diet - you lose weight because you are taking in less calories than you burn. It just happens to be a tasty low calorie diet that will give you heart disease. I agree that bad carbs are largely to blame for fat (in my unscientific opinion, but the caloric content of a steak is far smaller than the caloric content of the equivalent weight in french fries and ketchup. Atkins is easier to stick to because meat is tasty and treasured through its long history as a luxury food. We blame carbs instead of more accurately targeting “junk food and laziness”.
That certainly is a “sort of” disagreement. It’s an easy diet for American fatties to go on, unlike calorie-counters, portion-measurements, and even fasts (which are painfully hard to stick to).
I’m not anti-Atkins because it’s working. I agree with the points that it’s a dangerous long-term diet, but when the alternatives are crap diets you’ll never stick to or nothing at all, I say go Atkins. Yes, it would be best if everyone just “ate right and exercised”, but America has proven that it CAN’T. So Atkins is the next-best thing.
You know, there’s only 12 calories in a medium-sized dill pickle. You may be on to something here. Excuse me, I’m off to write a book…