The Promise
Lose weight! Increase energy! Look great! This book will show you how it’s done. Not only that, it will show you how to change your life once and for all. You hold in your hands a book that has sold more than ten million copies since 1992. Probably two to three times that number of people have followed its teachings. Most of you will have heard people say it’s the most effective weight loss plan they’ve tried. It is! If you’re like many people, you’ve been through the weight-loss wars.
Name it and you’ve probably tried it, whether it’s a low-fat diet, a food-combining diet, the grapefruit diet, liquid fasts, other fad diets, and on and on. You’ve learned how to count calories, but ultimately with no success. Even if you lost weight, you were often hungry and always felt deprived. Then when you went back to your old way of eating, those pounds crept back, often joined by a few more.
In the first picture, I am standing behind a huge table heaped with food. My expression is a mixture of pride and anticipation and no wonder. There are mounds of seeds and nuts, platters of fish, a lobster in drawn butter, well-seasoned fish, turkey and duck, and certainly a juicy steak. You’ll spy an omelet that would do any breakfast table proud. There’s no lack of variety here.
The Two Pictures
I see vegetables in abundance, fresh green salads drenched in healthy olive oil-based dressing overflowing their bowls, and peeking out through the foliage, blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries topped with whipped cream. There’s a variety of cheeses. And since this is a picture of the food you’ll be eating after you’ve lost your extra pounds and have reached the Lifetime Maintenance phase of Atkins, you will also notice a glass of wine, pan-fried sweet potatoes, a platter of melon, and slices of peaches and plums.
Finally, developments in creating controlled carbohydrate substitute ingredients make it possible to also place a pleasing array of controlled carb bread, cheesecake, ice cream, and cookies on the groaning table.
Changing Your Mind Set
Have you bought into the idea that to lose weight and feel good you have to adopt a low-fat diet? If so, the principles and approach I’m about to outline for you might just seem counterintuitive. They certainly do to those who criticize them. But in the ten years since this book was first published, new scientific research has been conducted and published that shows that a controlled carbohydrate nutritional approach is better for you and for your body than a low fat, high-carbohydrate nutritional approach.
The Four Principles of the Atkins Nutritional Approach
You will lose weight. It’s hard not to. Both men and women who follow the Atkins approach to weight loss readily take off pounds and inches. For the small numbers who have a truly hardcore metabolic resistance to weight loss, Chapter 20 will go into detail about how to overcome the barriers that prevent a successful outcome. Optimizing body weight is a valuable element of any health-oriented program because, by and large, being significantly overweight is an indicator of potential health problems, now or in the future. When you’ve taken the pounds off, you’ll see the benefits, and they will be far more than merely cosmetic
