The Atkins diet is really called the Atkins nutritional approach. It's a low-carb diet created by Robert Atkins. He had gained a lot of weight in medical school. A medical Journal had an article about a diet. He built on that diet and eventually made it popular.

Dr. Atkins had rather radical theories about the nature of weight gain as expressed in the Atkins diet. He held that saturated fats weren't as bad as people claim. Carbohydrates, found in potatoes, and breads, were the real problem. In Atkins theory eating too little fat make things even worse. He pointed to all the low-fat foods that were high in carbohydrates. That meant people on a diet often ate foods that were worse than they normally ate.

The Atkins diet shifts the focus. He shifts dieters' metabolism to burn body fats by cutting out carbohydrates from their diets. Lose the fat lose the weight. The goal wasn't necessarily to take in fewer calories. The diet would work because it burned calories. The Atkins diet supposedly burned an extra 950 calories everyday. That sounded good but it wasn't true.

The Atkins diet also 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. So in general any diet that helps decrease weight will help address type 2 diabetes. But the Atkins diet is also low in carbohydrates, which must be avoided with type 2 diabetes regardless of caloric intake, so by means of this aspect of the diet Atkins claimed those who suffer type 2 diabetes would no longer need medication such as insulin. But that's counter to the prevailing medical theories regarding type 2 diabetes which, although recommending that lowered intake of carbohydrates and weight loss help manage diabetes, ascribe no causal relationship between carbohydrates and type 2 diabetes.

What steps does one take to follow the Atkins diet? Induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance are the four necessary phases of the diet. Here are more details of Induction which is the most crucial of the phases.

As the first phase, Induction is the most crucial and most restrictive portion of the Atkins diet. It lasts for about two weeks. Carbohydrates are nearly removed entirely from the diet, only 15-20 grams can be consumed each 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 of 20 pounds over this period isn't uncommon - that's a staggering amount.

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. Dr. Atkins himself died of complications of increased fat intake in his diet, which is something to keep in mind when choosing this diet.