What about the Atkins Diet?

The Atkins Diet is a very low-carbohydrate diet achieved by cutting out foods with a high carbohydrate content. Carbohydrate is replaced with protein and fat from foods like meat and cheese.

This, of course, flies in the face of advice to cut down on fat from meat and dairy products (loaded with saturated fatty acids).

There’s no doubt that the conventional low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet has failed a lot of people. And now we have good evidence that it can exacerbate some features of the metabolic syndrome. So it’s little wonder that many people were attracted to the opposite approach (high-fat, low-carbohydrate) offered by the Atkins Diet.

But losing weight by avoiding helpful carbohydrate foods and flooding your arteries with saturated fat is rather like curing work stress by staying at home and injecting heroin.

The high intake of saturated fat that many people have on the Atkins Diet is a real problem. Saturated fat raises your level of LDL-cholesterol (bad cholesterol), and increases the risk of cancer and thrombosis (blood clots in the circulation).

The answer lies in shifting the balance of nutrients. Saturated and trans fats are very damaging while other types of fat are essential. With helpful fats, the trick is to get the different fatty acids in the right proportion. Choosing the optimum quality and quantity of carbohydrate to maintain a low-GL diet  is crucial. Eating enough protein (including vegetable protein) makes all the difference to appetite control – and hence to losing weight effectively without feeling hungry, tired or deprived.

This may sound complicated but my diet plan will show you exactly how to do it until it becomes second nature. And the ground-breaking MUNCH method gives you a simple tool to go on getting the balance right – for good.

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