newbie needs opinions

[xfudge3]

hi i currently started the atkin's diet today, and i have a few questions:

are we limited in the amount of calories we eat? i'm a big believer of if you burn off more than you eat, you lose weight. so on the atkins you are still suppose to count calories right?

i have a tendency of buying everything fat free or low fat, is that ok for the atkins since i realized most of the poultry are high in fat. i'm going to costco today to get some turkey breast and fat free cheese, just wondering if thats a good start. i have problems with eating anything that has more than 4 grams of fat per serving

[Jerzaka]

Re: newbie needs opinions

Hi! Welcome to Atkins! I'm wondering if you have the 2002 Atkins Book? If not, try and pick one up. You'll be glad you did. One thing though, Atkins is NOT a low fat diet. Low fat cheese and fat free cheeses are a big NO-NO.

Maybe one of the moderators will stop by and give you a better idea on how to approach this than I can.

I see you like poultry, a good start with poultry is to buy it with the skin on and don't forget "Induction" veggies. Oh, and drink LOTS of water!

Good luck

[Atkid]

Re: newbie needs opinions

Hi Xfudge, welcome to the board. When doing Atkins you should not buy lowfat or fatfree items. Below is an article that may help you understand why Atkins is highfat.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~
Why low carb should be high fat...
There is a Short section on this in the FAQ, but the subject really does merit a larger article. NOT written by me, and if anyone knows the credit please forward so that I can add it.

"Trying to keep both your fat and carb intakes low in the hope of losing weight more quickly? It's probably not a good idea, and you do it only at your own risk.

Your body needs energy to perform all the little daily tasks it's called upon to do. It takes energy to walk, to digest food, to sit in an erect position, to move, to breathe -- even to think. It even requires energy to sleep, and for your body to repair itself of all the little damages it incurs during daily life.

Fortunately, your body is a very efficient power plant. It can use any of three fuels to generate the energy it needs. Only if it runs out of those fuels will it be totally unable to produce energy and cease to operate. But before it reaches that state it goes into a stage comparable to rolling blackouts -- a condition in which it warns you through various symptoms including, but not limited to, hunger, aches and pains, extreme fatigue, bowel irregularities, and even problems with the texture of your skin and hair, that it needs more fuel. However, you should never let your body get to the point of warning you that it's out of fuel. Here's why:

The three types of fuel the body can use are carbohydrates, fats, and protein. Carbohydrates are the body's "preferred" fuel -- the one it will use first, if available. If there are no carbs (sugars and starches) available, then it will use fats. And only as very last resort -- after having warned you via the "rolling blackout" method that it's in real trouble -- will the body use protein as a fuel.

That's because the protein you eat is needed by the body's organs and muscles, and is constantly used by those organs and muscles to keep in good repair. So if you require protein to produce the energy for your daily activities, you divert it from its prime -- and very important -- purpose. You could even end up cannibalizing your body, causing a breakdown of first its muscles and then the major organs you need to simply sustain life. (This, by the way, is why some doctors and nutritionists are so convinced that low-carbing will shrivel your muscles, eat your liver and do unspeakable things to your kidneys. They don't consider the fact that the body will use fat for energy before it'll use protein if it's supplied with enough fat for its needs. And because they're so conditioned to the low-fat way of eating they can't even imagine anyone eating enough fat to supply their body with energy, for heaven's sake!)

Now back to the body's preferred fuels. We are mostly conditioned from birth to use carbohydrates for fuel, so the body will use them automatically. (There's a good reason why human breast milk -- nature's intended food for infants -- contains more than 1.5 times the carbohydrates that cows' milk does.)

Most people get more than enough carbohydrates to fuel their bodies' daily activites. The body, being a well-run power plant, puts the leftovers in storage to use in the future if it's needed. But it can't store carbohydrates, so it turns them into fat and keeps them on deposit in the body's cells. And we see it walking around the streets wherever we go, hanging off bodies in a most unattractive way. Some of us see it every time we look in the mirror, as well, and don't like the way it looks on us.

An excess of fat storage is usually the reason we choose a low-carb way of life. We want our bodies to use the stored fat for energy and leave our bodies lean and sleek looking. And, as we all know, it works. But we can make it work far more efficiently by understanding the way the body uses fat.

The switchover from using carbs for energy to using fats for energy is only semi-automatic. In the absence of carbs the body will use fat, but only sparingly. Remember, the body is conditioned to store that fat against the time when it runs out of fuel. It considers fat an "emergency ration" and it goes into conservation mode, producing only the amount of energy that's necessary to sustain life, and you go into those "rolling blackouts." You may feel hunger, fatigue, muscle aches, joint pain, etc. You may become extremely constipated. Or you may just feel a general malaise. This happens to many people when they begin a low-carb diet, and often keeps them from following through. "Oh, I tried that," they'll say, "And it didn't work for me."

There is a way, though, to train the body to use fat automatically as its preferred fuel, and one that it can safely use to produce unlimited amounts of energy. You do that by depriving it of carbohydrates, while at the same time providing it a good supply of dietary fat. After a while -- usually only a few days -- this convinces your body that it can always expect to have a bountiful supply of fat to use as fuel for its energy generator and takes it out of conservation mode. Because it has both dietary fat and stored fat to draw upon, and has no reason to stay in conservation mode, the body will produce lots and lots of energy. You'll avoid the "rolling blackout" warnings and feel far better, with plenty of energy. And this will continue for as long as you eat enough fat to keep your body out of conservation mode.

This is one of the reasons that doctors who support the low-carb way of eating tell you that you shouldn't eat fat-free mayonnaise, salad dressings, cheeses, etc. (The other reason, of course is that most of them contain added carbohydrates just to make them barely edible.) It's also the basis for the widely touted and very effective "Fat Fast" method of jolting your body into weight loss if you find yourself in a persistent plateau.

But what the doctors often forget to mention is that these days even eating full-fat condiments and foods may not provide you with as many fats as you should have to encourage your body to freely burn fats. This is because so many of today's foods are routinely stripped of the good, healthy fats they used to contain.

For example, food animals are bred to be as close to fat-free as possible. Beef and pork is touted as being "lean," and it is -- almost to the point of being tasteless. It's nearly impossible to get chicken with the fat and skin still attached -- I have to order it specially from my supermarket. Recipes routinely call for pans to be sprayed with fat-free sprays rather than using fats to keep the food from sticking, and even those of us who follow a low-carb way of life often use them, thinking we're doing the right thing.

So to avoid depriving our bodies of both fats and carbohydrates at the same time, we often have to consciously add fats to our diet. Trying to eat a low-fat or reduced-fat diet along with a low-carb diet is almost a sure recipe for failure. It may appear to be effective, at least for a while. You may lose some weight, but despite cutting your carbohydrates down to almost zero you probably won't lose as much as you would if you were eating more fat. You surely won't feel nearly as good as you would if you ate more fat. And you may even end up falling by the wayside along with those people who say "Oh, I tried that, and it didn't work for me.""

Taken from... http://www.low-carb.org.uk/lowcarbhighfat.htm

[xfudge3]

Re: newbie needs opinions

i'm still scared to eat like that, also full fat contents have so much more calories!
i'm such a calorie whore. i guess atkins isn't for me...?

[sombersusie]

Re: newbie needs opinions

i'd say start out small, it would seem you don't have a lot of weight to lose, so maybe if you just add it to your diet slowy you could help yourself. Especially compare the flavors of the food, how much better the cheese tastes and satisfies. You'll find you don't have to eat as much of it.

[kiki_chrissy]

Re: newbie needs opinions

I had started Atkins about 6 months ago, and was counting my calories at the same time. When I've been on previous low-fat diets, I was constantly hungry. I would bargan with myself at the end of the day to get a few extra calories in just to overcome the hunger pains.

After being on a low-carb, high-fat diet, I was struggling to eat more than 1200 calories in a day because I was full. The feeling of satisfaction is might higher with fat vs. low-fat foods.

My suggestion is to goto www.fitday.com and record your daily intake. See what calories you're currently at. Then, try for a couple of weeks doing all Atkins. Compare what your daily intake of calories really are. You'll be suprized how little you're actually eating.

~Kiki

[Elizellen]

Re: newbie needs opinions

Eating the Atkins way is one of allowing your body to decide how much you eat, as we are told to eat when hungry and stop when we are no longer hungry.

As we choose to eat foods higher in fat then the average 'diet' allows we find the fat in our meals fills us up earlier and keeps us full longer, so although we are given no calorie limits many of us find we are satisfied by eating less calories than we would be on one of the many lowfat diets.

On induction I never counted calories, but counted carbs and ate to the suggested maximums given in DANDR. I felt as if I was eating lots more food than when on other diets, as I was seldom hungry, and if I did get hungry knew I was allowed to eat something from the long list of allowed yummy foods.

BUT when after six months or so I discovered www.fitday.com and started to enter my foods eaten each day I discovered to my amazement that although I was under the impresion that I was eating far more calories than I used to 'before Atkins', my meals were totalling something between 1000 and 1500 calories most days!!

So even though Dr Atkins told me not to count calories, by following his rules I ended up eating fewer calories - amazing!!

Why not give induction a chance and follow the rules, counting carbs and eating from the allowed list and see what happens?

You might find you like the foods! I know I will never go back to eating salads with that tastless lowfat dressing, and not adding natural fats like butter and cream to my cooking.

[xfudge3]

Re: newbie needs opinions

umm i guess i could give it a try. i just had dinner, skipped lunch because i had to go out to run. i'm already at a normal weight, but i would like to get slimer for this fall and improve my time in track. i don't eat much, i've suffered from anorexia and bulimia. today i had around 500 calories and i'm already so full. eating fat scares me because being at a healthy weight, i fear eating it too much would cause me to gain, as it did in the past. today i had some tuna with butter spray( 0 calories/carbs/sugar) with tuna and 2 slices of honey roasted turkey breast, 3 slices of fat free cheese, lots of lettuce, and some more butter spray.

[Elizellen]

Re: newbie needs opinions

Apart from the fatfree cheese (what on earth is that made from I wonder?) the honey roasted turkey breast is not an 'Atkins-legal' food, as we dont eat stuff with added sugar.
To follow the Atkins rules you need to start reading labels for the ingredients - and reject anything with added sugar as much as you can. Anything called 'honey roasted' will have sugar or one of its aliases (destrose, cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup etc) listed on the ingredients and is not an Atkins-acceptable food.

If you havent already read the chapters in Dr Atkins New Diet Revolution (DANDR) about induction, please try to make the time to do so, as it will make your venture into lowcarb more likely to succeed.

Like with many technical subjects, reading the manual before starting Atkins will give you a better chance of success!!

[ValidRouge]

Re: newbie needs opinions

To quote Dr. Atkins, DANDR v 2002 page 127

"I cannot stress strongly enough that trying to do a low-fat version of Atkins will interfere with fat burning and derail your weight loss."

Go take a look at the Before and After forum, and tell those people that eating full fat calories doesn't work. Tell me it doesn't work. Go to the cholesterol forum and tell them that full fat will make their cholesterol go up. Go look at post after post after post on here about people having to force themselves to eat because they feel so full all the time. Look at the Review my menu forum and see how many times we encourage people to eat fresh foods including vegetables and how many times we have to warn people that they are eating far far too few calories because of the appetite suppression. Look at the induction forums and the success forums to see the reports of the incredible amounts of weight lost eating full fat foods.

But beyond that, Please read Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution version 2002 to understand WHY eating full fat foods allows your body to be a very efficient fat burning, lean body mass building machine. Learn what the sugar and Low Fat foods are doing to our bodies...getting fatter, getting sicker (cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.) I think if you read the book and the scientific evidence that supports it, you'll understand why our culture has been led down the wrong path of "Low Fat".

[G-Mom]

Re: newbie needs opinions

X, you say you are at a normal weight, yet you want to lose 25 lbs?! You are alarming me very, very much since you are recovering from bulimia and anorexia. You need to sit down and read Dr. A's book, then tell yourself you NEED FOOD!!!! Atkineers EAT, so that you must do.

Next, you aren't getting any nutrients!!! Are you in high school? Are you growing still? If you are, please get your family in on this whole new weight loss idea of yours, NOW! Then come back for tips. I mean this with only concern for you, dear.

[tabekat]

Re: newbie needs opinions

not counting calories is one of the greatest joys of atkins. don't deprive yourself of an opportunity to be free of neurotic dieting behaviors.

check out what eating fat did for sheila.

http://www.sugarfreesheila.com/index.html

[xfudge3]

Re: newbie needs opinions

counting calories is an obsession of mine. i cannot change that. everytime i go passed 500 calories i freak out and stop eating till the next day. atkins isn't for me, i just realized i cannot follow this diet right, even up to the very basics. and yeah, i am in high school. my mom knows about my eating disorders, thats why she stressed me to follow a diet that's more healthy.

[tabekat]

Re: newbie needs opinions

life is short and there are people who need you. why waste your time on earth obsessing about things that cannot nuture your spirit?

hope you come back someday, when you love yourself and your body enough not to use them as a mental minefield.

good luck, and listen to your mom.