Dr. Atkin's Diet Revolution

Excerpted from
Dr. Atkin's Diet Revolution
By Robert C. Atkins, M.D.

Millions of words have been written and spoken about overweight By now everybody knows everything about it - except what causes it and how to get rid of it.

I am constantly amazed at even how few physicians are treating the real cause of overweight No wonder it doesn't go away.

Revolutionize your ideas about the cause of overweight. Are you thinking, "But surely it is caused by just overeating?"

Not so! This is one of those assumptions we have always taken for granted, one of the many myths about overweight that it is now time to unlearn.

Metabolic imbalance causes most overweight. For fifty years, ever since the first best-selling diet book appeared, doctors and dietitians have been telling us that losing is just a matter of adjusting your calorie intake and eating a balanced diet.

But most people - and that includes doctors and dietitians - are totally ignorant of the metabolic Imbalance that is the primary cause of almost alloverweight.

The result of fifty years of prescribing a so-called "balanced diet" for patients who actually were suffering from metabolic imbalance is a raging national epidemic of overweight.

A revolution in our debt thinking is long overdue. Overweight brings many problems with it Our biggest health problem today - cardiovascular disease - is closely linked with overweight So is diabetes, heightened accident and surgical risk, hyperinsulinism, arthritis, diseases of the kidneys, liver, gallbladder, even suicide.

How is this a diet revolution? If a revolution is a successful revolt against entrenched order, then the last eight years of my practice represents one. Ill be telling you more about how it all happened in the next few chapters, but to nun up, I've treated ten thousand patients for overweight in that time.

They have all lost weight without counting calories, without diet pills, and most without feeling a single pang of hunger.

They haven't lost by eating less of a "balanced diet." To begin with, this diet isn't "balanced" It is deliberately unbalanced. The reason - to counteract the metabolic imbalance that causes people to get fat in the first place.

You see, most balanced diets are around 50 percent carbohydrate, 30 percent protein, 20 percent fat. Overweight people usually have a disturbed carbohydrate metabolism, so they can't handle that much carbohydrate. In this diet we first cut out carbohydrates altogether, then keep them cut way down permanently.

This is A no-hunger diet. One of the happy side effects of this deliberately imbalanced therapeutic diet is the fantastic change that it brings about to your hunger pattern.

My patients lose whether they eat snore or less on this no-hunger diet. Most people eat less, but it's only because what they get on this diet so completely satisfies their hanger. They find they just can't eat as much as they used to because what they get on this diet so completely satisfies their hunger. They find they just can't eat as much as they sued.

But some have lost thirty, forty, one hundred, or more pounds, while consuming two to three thousand calories or more a day, enough to make the point that if you want to eat that much, you still can lose.

They've lost weight on bacon and eggs for breakfast, on heavy cream in their coffee, on mayonnaise in their salads, butter sauce on their lobster; on spareribs, roast duck, pastrami; on my special cheesecake for dessert (See recipe, page 246.) And on this diet, cholesterol levels usually go down, and even more important, triglyceride levels (you'll learn about this in the recipe chapter) almost always go down. My patients hove shed years along with the pounds. They have gamed energy, cheerfulness, self-confidence. They're new people. And they no longer count calories.

This is because I don't believe that losing weight is a simple matter of counting calories and of Just operating the body on a calorie deficit.

The calorie- counting approach has failed. Orthodox medicine's conspicuous lack of success in treating overweight hasn't caused the profession to search widely for alternatives to calorie-counting approaches.

Instead, other events have taken place. A gigantic low-calorie food and drink industry has exploded into being. The drug industry has produced a multicolored Niagara of diet pills. Have all these appetite suppressants and all these low-calorie victuals and drinks turned us from a fat nation into a trim nation? You know the answer! Every year more of us worry about overweight, and rightly so, for every year in our increasingly sedentary society, more of us age and die prematurely from diseases linked with faulty diet and overweight.