The weight-loss phases of Atkins are an excellent argument in favor of preparing most of one’s food at home. This is the most frugal and nutritious approach anyway if those are goals of yours; you know what’s going into your meals and you have total control. But it’s also a huge help with carb counts. Even when someone else makes my meal for me when I’m at home (my little girl’s dad sometimes cooks for us), I have to guesstimate a lot, but if I do it myself it’s no problem.
It sounds obsessive and control-freaky but one of the goals of Atkins is to know your limitations insofar as how many grams of carbohydrate you can get away with in a day and stay at your current weight or lose weight. And the reason this matters is that the primary metabolism for human beings is the glucose metabolism, and glucose calories are therefore the calories that count for most people. Fat is turned into various biochemicals and used to transport fat-soluble vitamins; protein is used to build cell structures; if you’re getting enough carbs, neither fats nor proteins are used for fuel. This is the gaping, bleeding hole in calorie theory. Calories do count, but only the ones you’re burning!
Meanwhile, I’ve been rotten this week, but only to a point. Wednesday I decided I was tired of salads and had a wrap sandwich at Subway. They don’t use the low-carb tortillas for their wraps anymore but I could have done worse; the wrap was 33g (I don’t know about the fiber content), lower than any of the breads. I checked the next day and I was still in ketosis. I’m not sure if I’d been knocked out of it at any point and then went back in; if not, my carb tolerance is higher than I thought it was! Yesterday at the state fair I ate a few French fries (as in, less than half a dozen) and bought a sugar-free “homebrewed” root beer at one of the booths; the man said he’d gotten complaints about the sugar-free version and his fix was to add less than half a cup of the sugary stuff on top to help the flavor. I agreed to it because he sweetens the diet root beer with aspartame, which I really do not like. I think I had one or two other episodes with stuff I was not supposed to eat–oh yeah. I got some sugar-free Twizzlers Thursday night. That in itself wasn’t much of a problem although it’s kind of stupid to use up your carb allowance with something that can only be described as junk food, but at the time I was missing junk, probably because I was hungry. So I ate more of those at a time than I should have. Again, it wasn’t an excessive cheat; I seem to be good at taking dabs here and bits there every now and again and then stopping. I still have some Twizzlers left, actually, I think, and it was a small package to begin with.
The cheating bugs me a little because even though I am reasonable-ish about it I don’t want to turn this into a nasty little pattern of justifying cheats to myself and then shriving myself afterwards. This may just be my conscience working in overdrive, though. I’m more worried, actually, that I’m not getting my full carb count during the day with stuff I AM supposed to eat than I am about the cheats.
I’ve upped my allowance to 35 grams a day for the next few weeks and will be doing my utmost to make sure I hit the mark more often than not. I really need to see if the weight loss continues at that level. It makes me wonder about how realistic it is to increase carb count 5g a week like the Atkins book says to do. Seems like in no time I would be up to 50g a week and wondering when the heck my weight loss stopped and having to back down again. Better to take it slowly, I would think.
Which also makes me wonder about the folks who choose to stay in Induction for months at a time. Dr. Atkins thought this would not be harmful to most people who try it, but why not simply add on about five grams a month? Then it’s lots easier to see where your carb tolerance is and you can still lose weight like whoa. And you can also still do the Pre-Maintenance phase of adding 10g at a time, at least in theory, later on.
Although I’m starting to wonder about that too. You’re supposed to do OWL until you’re within ten pounds or so of your goal weight. OK, fine. But what if your carb tolerance is low? It would be all too easy to overshoot your limit in Pre-Maintenance, I would think, especially if your ACE (Atkins Carbohydrate Equilibrium) is 40g or so.
Oh well. The beauty of this diet is that you can tailor it to some degree to meet your needs. Some people who go on Atkins never do Induction at all, but start at 100g a day or so and gradually lower the carb intake until they start losing (if they aren’t losing at 100–some people do!). Whatever works for you.
