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How to Never Plateau on Atkins
The Two BIG Atkins fixes that make the diet work indefinitely

A lot of people get "stuck" after doing the Atkins diet for any length of time. Atkins has 2 major, but easily fixed flaws.

Your body can get it's energy from 4 different sources (and oddly enough in this preferential order) alcohol, carbs/protein, fat. If you are drinking alcohol, that is your primary fuel. Your body will burn that first. Your body will burn ALL the alcohol. It will never take alcohol and turn it into fat to use later.

Next, your body will burn carbs and excess protein as glycogen. If you consume too many carbs, your body turns the excess glycogen into fat to store for later - feast or famine survival mechanism. This is the first main reason why typical low-fat diets ironically make a lot of people fat. Because low fat almost always equals high carb.

To a lesser extent and through a much more inefficient process, your body turns excess protein into glycogen and uses that for energy too. In extreme excess even too much protein can make you fat because the excess glycogen can be converted to fat stores. But you have to eat a lot of protein to be in danger of doing this.

And lastly, in the absence of alcohol, carbs (and massive amounts of protein) your body will burn fat. Your body is much less efficient at burning fat than carbs for fuel. This is the "metabolic advantage" Atkins talks about with his diet. So if you can eat 2000 calories on a high carb diet and not get fat, when you switch over to a low carb diet and your body now must burn fat for fuel, that number may go up to say... 2800 calories. There are also 2 other advantages that he briefly mentions:

  1. It's easy to overeat on carbs, (the second major reason low fat diets fail) and hard to overeat on fat. How many cookies could you eat in one sitting? ice-cream? french bread? Fries? How much celery and cream cheese could you eat at one time? What about plain cheese? You simply can't pig-out on fat. You get full.
  2. When your body switches over to burning fat and you are in deep ketosis, there is a definite naturally occurring appetite suppressant factor that occurs. You're not nearly as hungry all the time as a fat burning machine as you were when you were a carb burning machine. Anyone who has ever done Atkins (and not cheated) can attest to this. But you have to really get into ketosis to experience this. Like 20 carbs a day TOPS. Any more than that and the diet still works, but you don't have the benefit of appetite suppression.

But Atkins does have flaws. Flaw number 1: Atkins says on his diet you don't have to worry about calories at all and just eat until you are "satisfied". For MOST people when you switch over from a carb fueled machine to a less efficient (this is a good thing it means you can eat more calories!) fat burning machine, you can eat until you're full, and even though you are consuming the same amount or more calories, you still loose weight because of the metabolic advantage. BUT, this doesn't mean "Calories don't matter." It just means the diet is so damn good that most people don't have to count calories.

But this is what can and does happen for some people - actually for a LOT of people. Lets say you do all the work and switch from a carb burning machine to a fat burning machine and you're only having 12 grams of carbs a day. And now because of the metabolic advantage you can have 2800 calories a day instead of 2000. Well what if you eat 2800 calories a day? Even though you're only getting 12 grams/carbs a day, guess what? You won't loose weight! I know so many people that get "stuck" on Atkins after a few weeks, that hit a plateau. Atkins says to stay the course and push through. I disagree. If you're stuck it's because you are consuming too many calories. Period. Even with the metabolic advantage, even with everything working in your favor, you can still overdo it. When you get stuck the key is to cut calories. Atkins is good. But it can't violate the basic law of thermodynamics.

Atkins second major flaw.
Now this is just my personal theory (well several others share this same theory.) The only scientific data on this is just observational on how my own body reacts, so keep that in mind when deciding whether you want to support the theory or not.

The human body has an amazing capacity to adapt. Anyone who's ever lifted weights can attest to this. You lift weights week after week you do slightly more reps or add slightly more weight and get stronger and stronger, and then suddenly without anything changing, you get stuck. You can't add any more weight or reps, maybe you even start backsliding a bit. How do you get past this? You have to switch it up, take a few days off then change to a new exercise, shock your system out of it and then you make progress again.

I think the same holds true for dieting. You shock your system by switching from a carb burning machine to a fat burning machine (for many of you for the first time in your life!) and you loose weight like crazy. But after a few weeks the weight loss slows or stops altogether. Why? It could be because you're inadvertently violating the main rule of dieting - consuming more calories than you burn off. But I think part of it is because your body ADAPTS. It gets more efficient at burning fat for it's primary fuel. So now you can't have quite as many calories as you could when you first started the diet. And maybe your palate adjust too and you grow to like Atkins foods. Now you can eat 6 slices of cheese at a time instead of 3. More calories.

So if you're not willing to eat less or exercise more to get your calorie balance in check you can do this: Do Atkins for a month. Keep carbs low and make sure not to go overboard with the total calories. And then after a month, completely switch it up for a week. Go high carb and low fat. After a week, switch it back up and BAM! The diet is kick started and pounds keep coming off. You don't even have to do a whole week, a 4 day weekend would probably work.

The good way to do this would be to switch over to natural healthy complex carbs like wheat bread, kidney beans, whole wheat pasta, black beans, wild rice, etc and lean protein. But most people take this as an opportunity to eat pizza and big-macs and fries and ice-cream. That's understandable. We're only human. The downside to doing it that way, is you feel like total crap. Especially after being on Atkins and living without the spikes and crashes in your bloodsugar and insulin levels. When you eat lots of high glycemic index carbs it's just miserable. Sure it's great to be able eat foods like Pizza and fries again, but it leaves you feeling like crap. Even on this phase when I'm high-carbing, I still try to stay away from sugar as much as possible. Sugar is just straight-up poison. You could go your whole life without sugar and be fine. It has no nutritional value whatsoever aside from quick empty carbs. The other downside to this approach is that many people were addicted to certain carb foods and you broke that addiction through abstinence. Make sure not to re-addict yourself in your time off. Keep your calories in check on this phase too. You don't want to undo a month worth of dieting with a one week binge. This is not a binge, not a free for all; it's a change up.

So if you've gotten stuck on Atkins, remember to keep your calories in check. And try the switch up after a month. Both strategies work!