You Ain’t Doing Atkins

In real life, I have trouble ranting at people to their faces. I’m no Dr. Cox, able to recite a rant off the top of my head. So I’m going to rant here at the bazillion people who simply have no clue what they’re talking about when it comes to the Atkins eating plan, which I’m doing again after four years off.

• “Well, I know SoandSo who went on Atkins and died three months later of a massive heart attack.” Look, lady, your friend was morbidly obese, had been all his life, had advanced Type II diabetes, and was doing Atkins in a last-ditch effort to try to save his life. It didn’t work; those are the breaks. The damage was done back when he was surgically attached to his couch downing an entire box of Little Debbies snack cakes in his graying underwear. If he’d decided in his twenties or thirties to reduce either his carbohydrates or his fats and start exercising regularly, he might be alive today.
• “All the steak and bacon you can eat can’t possibly be healthy for you.” Yeah, lady, it would be terribly boring; although it might be “allowed” by my eating plan, I’d shoot myself after three weeks just to get the flavor of bacon out of my mouth. No, wait, I’d shoot YOU and then go wash my mouth out just for you suggesting it. Sure, I tend to have bacon and eggs for breakfast, but I bet you a nickel that I get more fiber, non-starchy vegetables, and nutrient-dense food in a day than you do in any two days.
• “I tried Atkins and was just so tired all the time.” Seriously, did you give it at least two weeks and monitor every single thing that went into your mouth? No sugar alcohols, no sugars, no flour, no wheat, just healthy whole foods? Yeah, you probably were on it a couple of days, or else you spent the first two weeks inhaling so much low-carb junk food that you had explosive diarrhea from the sugar alcohols. Try it again, lady. Read “Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution” cover-to-cover. Don’t re-read just the Induction chapter and think you can wing it from there! Read the whole thing, then come back and plan your meals for a couple of weeks to match the initial (temporary) 20g carb per day limit. Unless you have extreme metabolic resistance or medications that affect your body’s ability to absorb ketones in lieu of glucose, you’ll get past the tired phase within a few days, and at most a week.
• “I’ve seen patient after patient in a hospital claim to be on the Atkins diet, and they’re horribly unhealthy.” Dude, what do you see in a hospital? You see sick people all day. The morbidly obese ones see Atkins as an easy way out of the problems they got themselves into over the course of decades through a high-fat, high-carbohydrate “diet”. High fat and high carb combined with a sedentary lifestyle is a recipe for the emergency room and premature death. Reduce fat, or carbs, or both. But either way, get off your ass and into the gym. I guarantee you those dying fat people, by and large, didn’t land in the ICU because of life-long adherence to a low-carbohydrate eating plan, working out at least three days a week, and attention to getting full nutrition from their foods or supplementation.
• “Atkins is a no-carb plan.” I was eating 90-110g of carbohydrates per day once I was in the maintenance phase and had lost all the weight I wanted to lose. Admittedly, that’s still 1/3 of the US RDA for carbs, and you have to start paying a bit more attention to the amount of fat in your diet at that level of carbohydrate… but that is in the book. You can’t live on really fatty stuff forever, just on induction and ongoing weight loss. Once you’re in pre-maintenance or maintenance, you ramp up the carbs to a level that your body can tolerate without gaining weight again. For some, that level is lower than others.
• “Low-carb only works because you’re eating less calories than most low-fat diets.” No $*!#, Sherlock. There’s a metabolic advantage to getting your calories from fat and protein, but according to the studies I’ve read it’s only a 10%-35% advantage. So for the typical 2,000 calorie per day diet, maybe you can eat an extra 200 calories on a low-carb plan. But, at least for me and thousands of other people, the satiety levels of a low-carb eating plan are the recipe to eat fewer calories without hunger or discomfort. If you’ve reached a stall in your weight loss, or you begin to feel tired, in fact the problem may be that you’re eating too little. The Atkins eating plan encourages you to eat as much as you need to feel satisfied at all times. If you’re hungry regularly, you aren’t eating right.
• “All-you-can-eat fat is going to kill you.” Yeah, you didn’t read the book, either. The farther along in your weight loss you get, the less fat you can eat and still maintain your Critical Carbohydrate Level for Maintenance.
• “Fat makes you fat.” No, glucose makes you fat. Humans can’t metabolize dietary fat directly to body fat. Go read “Good Calories, Bad Calories” for an understanding of the real metabolic process by which fat is stored or liberated by your body.
• “You can’t go without carbs too long. Your body needs carbs to survive.” Gee, Dr. Fatty, did you think that one up yourself? Go read up on Gluconeogenesis and get back to me. Done? Good. Your body will create all the glucose it needs if you have sufficient protein intake. Every healthy diet you see will include plenty of protein (except for those people in acute renal failure). Your brain usually requires 100-120g of glucose per day to survive. Once you’re in ketosis, it’s one of the last organs to be willing to use ketones (the sugar form of body or dietary fat) to power itself, and after a few days it will be willing to use 50-70g per day of its dietary requirement in the form of ketones. The rest need to be glucose, and your liver provides plenty of glucose synthesized from proteins for hte purpose.
• “Your body can’t build muscle on a low-carb diet.” Well, I’m living proof that the human body can put on muscle while on a low-carb diet. I’ve added quite a few pounds of lean body mass while losing weight on an exclusively low-carb eating plan. That said, however, for building muscle mass quickly, a cyclical ketogenic diet such as Mark McManus’ “MANS Diet” will allow you to build impressive amounts of muscle while on a diet that, five days out of seven, is a very low-carb diet.
• “The Atkins diet is so limiting.” For the first two weeks, sure. Try life after the first two weeks, gradually transitioning foods into your diet. White bread, pasta, rice, sugary foods, and corn are basically out of the picture, true. But whole grains and a huge variety of whole foods are available to me, and I never feel deprived.
• “You don’t see really skinny people on the Atkins diet.” By and large, I think you’re right on this one. Eating a high-fat, low-carb, moderate-protein diet alone won’t get one into six-pack abs and ripped, muscular physique. Of course, you need to lift weights to get there. Eventually, you have to drop the fats substantially, and maybe even watch some calories if you want to sport a six-pack at the beach. But if you’re substantially overweight, Atkins gets you close enough to six-pack Nirvana to see the shore. Put in the extra work, monitor your diet more closely, and keep reducing fat while keeping protein intake up to slim a muscular physique down to “Damn I look good with my shirt off” levels.
• “Atkins weight loss isn’t real weight loss. It’s mostly water weight.” Oh, this old song keeps coming up. Can you really tell me that the huge gut that I’ve lost and the newly-defined legs and pecs are all water weight? Sorry, you can lose quite a bit of “water weight” in the first few days of Atkins — 3 to 7 pounds, typically somewhere close to 5 pounds — but after that, it’s fat, baby. And if you aren’t exercising enough, maybe muscle, too, like with any diet.
• If you aren’t eating lots of non-starchy vegetables, you aren’t on Atkins. If you aren’t exercising daily, with intense workouts for at least 30 minutes three times a week, you aren’t on Atkins. If you aren’t counting every carb that goes into your mouth, you aren’t on Atkins. If you aren’t staying hydrated with at least 8 glasses of water per day, you aren’t on Atkins. If you aren’t monitoring your micro-nutrients to ensure you’re getting sufficient US RDA of all essential nutrients via your food choices (or optional supplementation), you aren’t on Atkins. If you haven’t read the book cover-to-cover, you aren’t on Atkins. If you are truly hungry for any length of time, you’re not doing Atkins. If you aren’t getting adequate rest, you’re not doing Atkins. If you limit yourself to 20 carbs per day until you reach your weight-loss goal, you aren’t on Atkins. His plan works, if you bother to follow it. Dr. Atkins was most concerned with heart health, and this is one of the heart-healthiest diets on the planet, particularly for those who have had difficulty maintaining a healthy weight using other methods. Follow it correctly, and you’ll reap the benefits. Follow it poorly, and you’re gonna kill yourself slowly and be like the millions of lemmings who claimed to be “On Atkins” without having anything beyond the faintest clue what they were doing.
• “You’re going to destroy your kidneys.” A low-carbohydrate, moderate-protein diet is not a danger to anybody who is not in acute renal failure. In fact, a great deal of anecdotes from those in moderate renal failure indicate that eliminating sugars from the diet is more effective in reducing further kidney damage than the low-protein diet recommended by some diets. If your kidneys are already in trouble, follow your doctor’s recommendations. If your kidneys are fine, you’re putting them far more at risk with the popular high-fat, high-carb diet of most Americans than with a healthy low-carb lifestyle.
• “Ketosis is a dangerous body state associated with chronic starvation.” No research has shown it to be dangerous in conjunction with a low-carbohydrate diet. Your body has a great deal of difficulty ridding itself of any body fat in the presence of insulin associated with a high-carb diet. To lose any fat at all, your body has to begin lipolysis; ketosis for low-carbers is simply lipolysis (and digestion of dietary fat) carried to the point where the liver gets involved to convert the extra fat into body-usable ketones; those that stick around in the bloodstream too long are unstable, and eventually convert to acetone which gets filtered out by the kidneys and put into the bladder. If you’re a Type 1 diabetic, starving, or extremely ill, a positive ketosis result can be worrying. If you’re healthy, a Type II diabetic, and consuming enough nutrients without vomiting them back up, ketosis can be a perfectly normal way to show that you’re metabolizing dietary and body fat in preference to carbohydrates.

In my humble opinion, the Diet Wars aren’t low-carb versus low-fat. We’ve arrived at a great deal of consensus as to what’s unhealthy: sugar, refined carbohydrates, and a sedentary lifestyle are universal ills. The war is health and nutrition vs. ignorance and apathy. If we’re on our feet, moving, and aware of and working toward a better diet, that’s 90% of the battle right there.

Now go do something useful. Me, I’m hitting the gym.