One step at a time

How to do the Atkins diet
The Atkins diet is meant to be a lifelong approach to eating, rather than a lose-weight-quick routine. There are four phases, each offering a slightly wider choice of foods than the last. The first, and most harsh, is the induction phase where your carbohydrate intake has to be reduced to 20g a day. This compares to a normal daily intake of up to 300g. Induction is what most people think of when Atkins springs to mind. It is a harsh regime with very few choices of food and is the closest the diet gets to its steaks and greasy fry-up reputation.

After a minimum of two weeks, you move to ongoing weight loss (OWL). Here, you can increase your intake of carbs by 5g a day until you stop losing weight. You can then make a choice - cut carbs by a small amount and keep losing pounds or prepare to set yourself up for eating the Atkins way for life. The pre-maintenance and maintenance phases allow you to eat a whole range of new foods (even the odd slice of bread) as long as you stay within your personal threshold (which you worked out during OWL). This threshold can be raised if you do a lot of exercise and the idea is to just eat enough carbs so that you don't start gaining weight again.

My experiment
There are clear-cut rules, but the diet is not easy to follow. Despite my best efforts to eliminate every conscious carb in my diet, I still ended up eating about 17g a day on average (that's from my usual level closer to 150g a day). Proteins went up from 71g to 73g a day and fat from 98g to 113g a day and my intake of saturated fats increased to double the recommended amount. However, I managed to reduce my calorie intake from about 2,000 a day to 1,500.

I avoided exercising throughout the experiment not only because I'm lazy but so that the end results would be unaffected. Even so, I started at 87.9kg and, 10 weeks later, weighed 80.8kg. My body fat went from 27% to 24.8%. So, some good came out of the experiment. The downside was that my bad cholesterol went up in relation to the good - this could increase my risk of heart disease in future. Also, thanks to my ketotic state, it is possible that any micronutrients I was taking in would not be properly absorbed.

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