Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

[ziggy]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

Hoss my advice for you is to learn and experience once you have learned what healthy eating is and have been on the atkins diet for 8 or so months you will never want to eat bad carbs ever again


bad carbohydrates cause type 2 diabetes and heart disease and many many other illnesses

when you learn all these things and experience how good you feel after being on atkins for a good 8 months and experience how easy it is to stick to it for life you will never want to go off it

Top Ten Nutritional Myths, Distortions, and Lies That Will Destroy Your Health.

websites like this and these atkin forums can help you learn these things just spend lots of time here

trust me the effort to learn these things is worth it you dont ever want to be at the mercy of the health care system and the average doctor

[Suzanne_H]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

Low fat, low calorie diets don't work for me for a number of reasons.

Cheese. Geez louise I love cheese. Fat-free cheese tastes like wax to me. Something's just bad wrong when cheese doesn't melt. Ack.

Meat. I love meat, just a dyed in the wool carnivore here. If the only meat I can enjoy is plain poached chicken breast without the skin or some can o' tuna jazzed up with corn syrup and chemical laden fat-free mayo well pfffffffft

Veggies. Oh I love veggies with butter and hollandaise and garden salads that burst with color and LIFE and tossed in homemade vinaigrette.... Oh! and fresh mozzarella with sliced just picked in the garden tomatoes with freshly snipped basil and drizzled with olive oil ahhhhh Just thinking about a plate of steamed veggies sprinkled with fake you-gotta-be-kiddin-me "Butter Buds" or that margarine spray stuff or oh oh oh those chemical madness salad dressing flavor sprays enough chemicals to preserve your tongue long after you're gone but hey no calories, right??? *cough*

Oh and berries with cream. That's a hug in a bowl right there. And real whipped cream. And nuts. I do love nuts, especially almonds and sesame and pumpkins seeds.

I'll be happy to throw down the glove and challenge the low-fat high carb folks to come up with tastier menus. Yep I do love this WOE.

[farmwife]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

Low fat, low calorie diets don't work for me for a number of reasons.

Cheese. Geez louise I love cheese. Fat-free cheese tastes like wax to me. Something's just bad wrong when cheese doesn't melt. Ack.

Meat. I love meat, just a dyed in the wool carnivore here. If the only meat I can enjoy is plain poached chicken breast without the skin or some can o' tuna jazzed up with corn syrup and chemical laden fat-free mayo well pfffffffft

Veggies. Oh I love veggies with butter and hollandaise and garden salads that burst with color and LIFE and tossed in homemade vinaigrette.... Oh! and fresh mozzarella with sliced just picked in the garden tomatoes with freshly snipped basil and drizzled with olive oil ahhhhh Just thinking about a plate of steamed veggies sprinkled with fake you-gotta-be-kiddin-me "Butter Buds" or that margarine spray stuff or oh oh oh those chemical madness salad dressing flavor sprays enough chemicals to preserve your tongue long after you're gone but hey no calories, right??? *cough*

Oh and berries with cream. That's a hug in a bowl right there. And real whipped cream. And nuts. I do love nuts, especially almonds and sesame and pumpkins seeds.

I'll be happy to throw down the glove and challenge the low-fat high carb folks to come up with tastier menus. Yep I do love this WOE.

Suzanne,
I was just reading your post, thinking.....this makes me hungry! Then it hit me, this is what I get to eat!!!

I LOVE ATKINS!!!!!

The food is so flavorful, so nourishing, so yummy!

[whereami]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

I have to agree with everyone you can't go back to eating carbs like you were before just because you have lost the weight....lol.......Im living proof. You have to convince yourself that the way you were eating before just isn't healthy and is not going to keep you slim.

Everytime I revert back to eating carbs, I gain weight and I gain it quickly. And the more I eat, the more I want to eat. When Im on Atkins Im full and happy and eat in a controlled manner. You just have to change the way you look at food. You gotta look at carbs and remember these are what caused your weight gain and your body doesn't handle them well and stay away from them.

But I will say, in my opinion, that if you do exercise regularly and build muscle, when you do mess up and eat carbs that it won't effect you as badly as before when you were not exercising and did not have muscle. So regular exercise and building muscle give you a little bit of leeway, in terms of weight gain, but not much.

[barrnone]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

I'm eating marinated pork loin and cauliflower for breakfast - come on - ya gotta love this 'diet'

[ShannonM]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

My point was that you want to lose the weight one way and then change your eating habits, which is what your acquaintance did. It didn't work for her and it won't work for you.

As others have said, there really are so many good things you get to eat with this lifestyle. If you can eat truly savory food and keep the weight off while doing so, why not just shoot for that?

[jcapulet]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

I've made low-carb lasagna that tasted even better than "regular" lasagna, low-carb pizza, low carb garlic bread, etc. If you're worried you won't be able to eat Italian foods, you'll be surprised.

Linda's web site has fantastic recipes. If you're interested, the lasagna one is in the ground beef section. I've never had better one

Linda's Low Carb Menus & Recipes - Main Dish Recipes

I agree with everyone that a low calorie will not work for maintenance. Tried to lose weight before with a low-calorie diet and I was hungry all the time. Whether several weeks or several months, I could not stand being hungry all the time. I felt like I was punishing myself for being overweight.

You can also have berries, nuts and lots of veggies later with the Atkins way of eating...I'd say give it a try

[Hoss]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

Well I'm starting today. I need to read the book but got the overall rules of induction from my brother who's doing atkins and from reading online. Wish me luck!

[jcapulet]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

Well I'm starting today. I need to read the book but got the overall rules of induction from my brother who's doing atkins and from reading online. Wish me luck!

Grats on starting, and best wishes with day one!

[mission to lose]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

Hoss,

Please read the book and all the induction info on the ADBB from the Forums. Might as well start out right on day one.

You will do great if you just follow the rules. Eventually you will be surprised how little you will crave foods from "the past" that are not good for you now.
And you will soon find you are changing your way of thinking when you make certain goals and discoveries about yourself and food.

And down the road, you will learn how you can eat some of those foods from "before", either through portion control/recipe moderation/frequency, etc, if the desire is even still there at all!

I may be wrong, but was it you who said earlier in another post, forgive me if I am wrong..."I'm Italian". Which I understood to mean your family makes a lot of pasta type meals. Well even if it was not you, this is still something I feel worth sharing.... My husband's background is from a Middle Eastern country. And most of their main meals are eaten with rice. Well after 35 years, I have become quite the cook and great lover of the food from his country, and so have our 2 sons. So I am quite used to eating rice when I cook a meal from his homeland. Except for the rice, their food consists of a lot of meat and good veggies. Anyway, we all recently took my Mom out to a Persian restaurant on the North side of Chicago, and then showed her around the decorated city streets downtown. At the restaurant I ate tons of food, but without the rice or any bread. I still left there full, and everything I ate was "allowed". And I still had a great time...(even without the rice...LOL).

[atkinsgal08]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

>>got the overall rules of induction from my brother>>

I'm sure he quoted them exactly as Dr. Atkins wrote them!

I wish you good planning!

[IrishIrish]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

Atkins was the most important change I ever made in my health. Returning to what made me fat is out of the questions. I love myself more than that. I occasionally have a meal or taste something that I used to eat, but it isn't worth getting too close to that slippery slope, falling, and not being able to recover again.

To each their own ... I guess it is deciding how you want to live. Returning to the way we used to eat will add pounds.

[not2late]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

Here are the facts....

1. If you eat the way that made you fat in the first place, you will gain weight. This is something you have to get straight into your head. This doesn't mean you will never, ever, ever be able to eat mashed potatoes again, but it means you will never, ever, ever be able to eat the same way you did while you were gaining weight---that is, if you want to maintain goal weight.

2. Too many people think the entire Atkins Diet is the Induction Phase, so either they stay on it, lose weight, start eating "normally", gain back their weight and then some, then tell everyone that Atkins doesn't work long-term. OR they get so bored or feel so restricted by the Induction Diet that they cheat* here and there and have to constantly re-start and re-start Induction so many times that they never lose more than 5-10% of the weight they want to lose. (Typically, they don't use the word "cheat"---they prefer to use terms like "adapting Atkins to suit my lifestyle" or "making Atkins work for me" in order for them to justify eating birthday cake or a dozen cookies. The word "cheat" is too negative and makes them feel bad, so they prefer not to use it.)

3. Atkins is a healthy lifestyle if it is done properly because you will eat less processed and refined foods.

[RitaCeleste]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

Actually, I stopped doing Atkins for awhile at one point and tried just counting calories. Soon I was starving and hungry all the time. This lead to a couple of binges. I just couldn't get full. I'd eat and an hour later I was back in the kitchen making something else. After awhile, I was miserable. I just was tired of being hungry. On Atkins I don't feel hungry. I started counting the carbs and figured out about how many carbs I could eat before I triggered my hunger. It didn't look like induction. I could have more things than I did on never ending induction. I could even work in a pot pie and not gain weight or be starving. But I was really ready to get the rest of the weight off. Sometimes I eat off plan, but I do it at a meal. I don't try to do it for days on end because being hungry really upsets me. I was reading the posts but none of them really hit how it was with hunger for me. I always thought I had to suffer and go hungry to loose weight. I hadn't seen my over-blown appetite for awhile and when it came back, it was horrible. And it was still there. I can handle the hunger long enough to get back on plan. I can't handle the hunger every single day for the rest of my life though. So I figure once you get to goal weight, you could go have that big bad Italian meal with family at a birthday, then go home and follow a low carb plan and take care of the weight gain and the hunger and keep your weight down and not have regrets about missing a special meal. I am keeping my weight off and going slow. I have eaten off plan a lot since Thanksgiving. But I have been very careful not to stay off plan, eating more carbs than I can handle for any amount of time. Atkins has become a tool I can use forever to control my hunger. To get some relief from it, to take off any pounds I'm tired of looking at. Remember anytime you want to loose the weight, Atkins is there just waiting for you to use it. Now I like to loose that weight when its five or ten pounds not 90 pounds! It won't come back overnight, you can put on the breaks at any point and decide not to let it go.

[bizzlekitty]

Re: Life after atkins, how hard it to keep it off...

Well I'm starting today. I need to read the book but got the overall rules of induction from my brother who's doing atkins and from reading online. Wish me luck!

Good luck! Make sure you do get the book and read the entire thing and look up the rules of Induction here to go by, not relying on someone else, no matter how well intended.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen people who thought they were doing Atkins and do not do it right. Then they wonder why it's not working and they can't stick to it.

Do it right and it does work. I've learned this lesson the hard way too.