Does The Atkins Diet Work?

Does the Atkins diet work?

Talk about a question that’s been asked since time immemorial!

Well, let’s get down to it and a bit more information about the Atkins diet than you probably hoped for…

Background:

The Atkins diet, formerly the Atkins Nutritional Approach, is the namesake of Robert Atkins, an American cardiologist.¹ Originally outlined in The Diet Revolution in 1972, the diet didn’t really gain prominence until the early 2000s after being updated and revised in releases like The New Diet Revolution in 1992 and 2002.

Overview:

The Atkins diet is a four-phase program that promotes the consumption of virtually limitless amounts of meat, cheese, eggs, and high-fat foods while rendering the consumption of carbs, especially refined carbs, to virtually nil.² To this end, there’s no calorie counting or portion control. The only item that has to be tracked is carb intake, which is done so by accounting for the net carbs in a food product rather than its total carbs.³

Why the reduction in carbs and almost nothing else?, you ask. Well, the Atkins diet calls for cutting carbs as low as it does because Dr. Atkins was of the mind that weight gain is attributed to insulin, not overeating. What does insulin have to do with carbs?, you ask. Well, when you consume carbs, the body breaks them down into glucose, a sugar that’s the body’s preferred energy source for physical activity and its cellular processes. Something else happens when carbs are consumed. That something else is the release of insulin. As the hormone that’s responsible for regulating blood sugar levels and nutrient partitioning, or telling nutrients where to go, insulin dictates whether glucose gets burned as immediate fuel or stored as fat for the body’s future energy needs.

By eating large amounts of carbs at a sitting, especially those that have a pronounced effect on blood sugar, one can see how the above can present a problem. For the sake of my explanation of this being as thorough as possible, though, let’s assume that you can’t see how the above can present a problem.⁴ Now, because you can’t see what’s so fucking obvious to someone like Dr. Atkins, let’s look at refined carbs.

As we know, refined carbs are found in processed foods, which are foods that manufacturers have stripped of the fiber, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients they normally carry.⁵ This removal not only makes the food product softer and less bulkier and improves its taste but also results in its sugar molecules quickly breaking down into energy in the bloodstream. This rapid rise in blood sugar levels in turn causes the rapid rise of insulin, which triggers the body to store the energy from the food as fat, thus lessening the chance of that stored energy getting burned as fuel.

Carbs that significantly impact blood sugar levels are clearly a problem. Being the case that they are, we have an idea why Dr. Atkins prescribes severely limiting the types and amount of carbs allowed under his protocol. But that’s just one reason for the low carb intake. There’s a second rationale, that being that without adequate streams of glucose entering the body via carbohydrates, the body will begin to burn fatty acids as its energy source, thus switching from burning sugar as energy to burning stored fat instead. This process of breaking down fat stores as an alternative fuel source is what’s known as ketosis, which you’ve more than likely heard of due to the now popular keto diet, essentially a simplified version of the Atkins diet on meth.

What To Eat:

Because carbs are the only thing that’s monitored, the choice of protein and fat options is virtually endless.⁶ Regarding carbs, people are encouraged to eat fiber-rich vegetables,⁷ low-sugar fruit,⁸ and complex carbs.⁹ Also available are numerous meals, shakes, and other products for sale from the Atkins line of low-carb foods.¹⁰ For refreshment, there’s water, coffee, herbal tea, club soda, diet soda, and seltzer.

Given that list, though, what a person is allowed to eat and drink on the Atkins diet depends on what phase they’re in.¹¹ For example, chickpeas, lentils, peanuts, berries, cherries, apples, and melons aren’t allowed until phase two, as are Greek yogurt, ricotta cheese, and cottage cheese while harder cheeses are allowed from the beginning. More fruit options are available in phase three, as are starchy vegetables like carrots and squash, as well as whole grains like oatmeal, quinoa, brown rice, and whole wheat pasta.

What Not To Eat:

The only foods to avoid are processed foods like pizza, candy, cake, and white rice. Apart from refined carbs that are made in labs and factories, everything that’s naturally found in nature is basically fair game, though it’s suggested to minimize those foods that have a high glycemic load, or raise blood sugar quickly. But even the suggestion of limiting certain foods depends on what phase a person is in. For example, starchy vegetables like corn and potatoes have a significant impact on blood sugar but they’re allowed once past the induction phase. The same goes for pineapple, mango, papaya, and bananas, all fruits with high sugar content. As for beverages, soda, lemonade, sweetened iced tea, energy drinks, and fruit juices are barred. So too is beer, sweet red wine, sherry, and port.¹²

Results:

Atkins doesn’t just bill itself as a diet that promises weight loss and the maintenance of it but also one that provides serious health benefits, such as preventing diabetes, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease. How true are these claims?

Concerning weight loss, Atkins very much does bring about weight loss like it promises. That, however, isn’t remarkable because the truth of the matter is that you’ll lose weight on any diet that restricts calories and makes you enter a negative energy balance, or calorie deficit, which is when you take in less calories than your body burns. Though claiming to work by controlling insulin, Atkins works in this exact manner of restricting calories. How it does so is two-fold, one of which is obvious and the other not as much.

The obvious display of calorie restriction is the fact that Atkins advises dieters to shoot for a total daily intake of 1500-1800 calories if they’re women and 1800-2200 if they’re men. Those are numbers that are far lower than the average person would regularly consume when not on a diet. However, Atkins doesn’t require calorie counting, so the other way that calorie restriction happens while on it isn’t as obvious. Now, how people eat less total calories than before without awareness of their doing so is by way of the decreased carbs, a macronutrient that usually provides more than half of the calories people consume. Moreover, with the choice of carbs limited primarily to those with high fiber content, appetite is reduced because fiber has a filling effect in the stomach. The same can be said of the increased intake of fat and protein, macronutrients that are more filling than carbs and have the effect of curbing hunger.

When it comes to more specific claims concerning Atkins’ ability to promote quick and lasting weight loss, a review of the seven most popular diets with clinical trials to support their claims found that those made by Atkins are indeed true, as the Atkins diet presented the most evidence of producing short- and long-term weight loss.¹³ That too sounds like a clear win, no? Well, it isn’t!

Speaking to the short-term effects, a lot of the weight that’s lost during the initial weeks, which can be as much as 15 lbs, is water weight owed to the very minimal intake of carbs. Remember, carb intake during the first phase is 20g net carbs per day and doesn’t go over 100g until you’re in the third phase weeks and months later. Regardless of the intake, it’s a far departure from the 300 or so grams that people normally consume. Now, because people aren’t consuming as many carbs as usual, there isn’t as much glycogen in their muscle cells.¹⁴ And because each gram of glycogen is attached to 3g of water, it’s not hard to figure out that a significant drop in carbs leads to the body not retaining as much water as it would if conditions were reversed.

Further helping with the loss of water weight are the kidneys working overtime to flush the body of excess ketones, the chemicals made in the liver when fat gets broken down into energy. As to why the kidneys rid the body of these ketones, it’s because the longer you go into ketosis, the more they build up in the bloodstream and make the blood acidic. So to prevent you from putrefying from the inside out, the kidneys increase urine production, which results in the loss of water.

As for long-term weight loss, the cited review found that Atkins prevails over the diets it was matched up against when followed for a year. However, the number of studies beyond those 12 months aren’t that great in number. In fact, there’s a dearth of studies lasting longer than a year on the success of Atkins. Given that, it’s hard to determine if its weight loss results are sustainable over the long haul. However, although there’s no empirical evidence to definitively say whether or not someone who undergoes Atkins will keep the weight off 2, 5, 10 years down the line, there’s proof from elsewhere that says that it won’t. What’s the proof?, you ask. The proof is the countless follow-up studies of diet participants, with researchers finding that a majority of people regain the weight they lost regardless of the diet plan. Given that Atkins doesn’t transform people from being people, the odds are high that Atkins practitioners will revert to their old habits and eventually experience weight rebound like any other dieter following termination of the plan and its tenets. What makes this almost certain with Atkins is that the loss of water that was mentioned above has no bearing on body composition.¹⁵ As soon as someone returns to their regular consumption of carbs, the water weight will return.

Now, regarding the claims made by Atkins about its health benefits, those too are true. People who’ve followed Atkins for a year have been found to lower their blood pressure and improve their triglycerides and blood sugar levels. But guess what? Just like any diet that restricts calories can help you lose weight, any diet that helps you lose weight can help improve a range of health markers to lessen the risk of diabetes and heart-related issues. So the health benefits claimed by Atkins aren’t exclusive to Atkins alone.

Safety:

It’s not uncommon to experience headache, dizziness, nausea, fatigue, weakness, or bad breath during the induction phase of Atkins. These potential side effects are the product of the body acclimating to powering itself on less glucose from the reduction in carbs. One may also experience these symptoms the more that ketones build up in the body as the diet progresses. If your carb choices aren’t fibrous enough, constipation, diarrhea, and nausea are also a concern.

Something else to be mindful of is that due to a menu that doesn’t include the intake of as many fruits, vegetables, and whole grains as is recommended by most dietary guidelines, there’s a risk of nutritional deficiencies, especially if you’re not supplementing with vitamins and minerals, which, in fairness, Atkins does make the suggestion of. Remaining on the topic of nutritional guidelines, someone on Atkins may consume more saturated fats than are recommended. What’s known is that a diet high in saturated fats increases the risk of cancer and heart disease. But because there haven’t been many studies on Atkins that last longer than a year, what’s not known are the long-term implications of a high saturated fat intake under it.

Those are some of the things to be aware of before beginning Atkins. As a whole, though, Atkins is one of the safest diets around. That, however, doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone. Those with preexisting kidney problems of any kind should steer clear of the diet and it may not be suitable for people taking diuretics, insulin, or oral diabetes medication, as well as women who are pregnant or breastfeeding.

Other:

Diets that severely limit entire food groups for extended periods of time tend to have higher dropout rates than diets that don’t. Atkins isn’t an exception. One of the complaints that users cite for giving the diet up is that many of the foods that are restricted are those that you’ll find yourself surrounded by if you socialize or eat out on a regular basis. Another complaint is that it can be difficult to follow. Then there’s the matter of always having to do the math to calculate net carbs. That becomes even more of a complication when socializing or eating out and the nutritional information of a food item isn’t readily available. Lastly, due to the limits placed on refined carbs, which are affordably priced because they’re cheap to produce, and the emphasis on protein and whole carb sources such as fresh fruits and veggies, the weekly grocery bill of someone on the Atkins diet can be 3x more expensive than what they would normally spend.

Glossary: caloric deficit, calories, diet, dietary fat, fat, hormones, muscle

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Monster Longe

Monster Longe is a personal trainer in San Diego. He has been lifting weights for +25 years and training clients in the gym and online for about half of that time. When not working with clients or making content that's easy to read, understand, and apply to everyday life, he enjoys long walks and leaving buildings crushed and entire city blocks decimated in his wake.