The short name for the Atkins nutritional approach is the Atkins diet. It's a low-carb diet created by Robert Atkins. He had gained a lot of weight in medical school. Atkins read about a low-carb diet in one of his medical journals. He built on that diet and eventually made it popular.

Atkins, in his Atkins Diet, believed prevailing theories about weight gain were all wrong. He held that saturated fats weren't as bad as people claim. The carbohydrates are the culprits. In Atkins theory eating too little fat make things even worse. Many low-fat foods are packed with carbohydrates. That meant people on a diet often ate foods that were worse than they normally ate.

This all changes in the Atkins diet. He shifts dieters' metabolism to burn body fats by cutting out carbohydrates from their diets. That's the goal of weight loss. It's not just a matter of eating less. The diet would work because it burned calories. In fact Atkins cited a study that claimed the body would burn an extra 950 calories on his diet. But the claims were not true.

In addition to claims of weight loss, Dr. Atkins said his Atkins diet could help people with type 2 diabetes. As opposed to type 1 diabetes, type 2 is often closely associated with diet and people who weigh too much. Weight loss associated with the Atkins diet, as with any diet, would therefore help people manage type 2 diabetes. In addition the Atkins diet also addresses the measure of taking in fewer carbohydrates which is part of managing type 2 diabetes, so that Dr. Atkins suggested people on his diet would no longer need to monitor their blood sugar or take insulin. The jury is still out in the medical world as to the causes of type 2 diabetes. So while science agrees with Atkins that lowering intake of Carbohydrates will help with the disease, it would disagree that the step alone would remove the necessity for medicine.

What are the specific rules of the Atkins diet? It follows four phases - induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance. Here are more details of Induction which is the most crucial of the phases.

The first phase of the Atkins diet, Induction, is like the boot camp for the diet. This phase should be followed for a period of two weeks. During this phase carbohydrates are severely limited – only up to 20 grams per day. The goal is to enter a fat burning metabolic phase called ketosis when the body, starved of glucose, will begin converting stored fat into fatty acids needed to power the body. Weight loss during this phase can be extreme – some Atkins followers reported losses of 5-10 pounds a week.

Learning the ideal carbohydrate levels for weight losing and for day to day intake after the weight loss ends are the purposes of the final three phases in the Atkins diet. Millions of people are still losing weight on this diet – but beware the dangers of taking in too much fat.

One of the pioneers of the diet revolution in the early part of 2000 is the Atkins Diet, a program created by cardiologist Dr. Robert Atkins for the patients of his private clinic. Because it is so very effective, the diet program has since evolved to include famous celebrities as part of its millions of followers.