Two Weeks of Atkins

I've followed Atkins faithfully for the last two weeks - and how has it gone?  First, the results.

The first week I lost 4 1/2 pounds. Last week I lost one pound, for a total of 5 /12 for the first two weeks.

This sounds better than it is. My starting weight was ballooned up from the trend I had been on, fueled by holiday excess.  Most of the holiday weight, it turns out, probably was water. Most or all of the first week's weight loss was certainly water. The Atkins book even asserts that it is likely water because on this diet you retain less salt and thus it is naturally diuretic. They urge being careful to not get dehydrated, and even up your salt intake to make sure your blood pressure doesn't drop too far (and of course, if you have blood pressure issues or medication, talk to your doctor first). Here's a picture of how my weight loss first stalled at Thanksgiving, ballooned up at Christmas, and now is back on track.

So hooray for me!  This is good, worth celebrating, but hardly a miracle. I did follow the eating guidelines faithfully, completely cold turkey on chocolate and other foods. That has resulted in a middling calorie intake, 1500 to 1800 calories.  The carb target has been 20 net carbs, and I've been slightly higher than that many days, but not more than 25 grams. I've followed the food lists, but my preference is for hearty vegetables like broccoli. Even the leafy vegetables I prefer cooked which lowers the fiber count and thus ups the net carb total. To actually keep the carb totals low, while still achieving the goal of eating lots of vegies, more salads are necessary. I'm strategizing how to get there.

I have felt pretty good. I have gotten hungry, especially at the half way point a week ago. I've eaten an egg/spinach/cheese bake for breakfast almost every day, and it wakes my appetite so I'm hungry for lunch and dinner. I've added in an afternoon snack most days, as I've found foods that are allowed and easy.  This has been cheese and/or olives most days, either grab and go in the office or at home as I make dinner.

Now comes the hard part:  deciding where to go from here.  Atkins, like many diets, has phases.  The first two weeks the idea is to de-tox your body from carb-fueled insulin levels. After that induction phase, the idea is to gradually add back carbs - both types of foods and total net carbs - until weight loss stalls. This requires assiduous tracking and self assessment.  You need to track your food in order to count your carbs. But you also need to monitor what types of foods you are eating to see if certain ones seem to trigger cravings or hunger.  Those foods are ones to eliminate, potentially forever for all practical purposes.

This part is really work. Tracking and adding up is actually a lot of work. The more you cook combination foods from raw ingredients, the harder it is to enter into any automated tracking program which will do the math. They do single foods great, they do name brand prepared foods great - good databases, and easy to enter a new one you will use again - but cooked from scratch foods with many ingredients are guesses or stretches for close matches.  I've started entering my recipes into my recipe program on the computer, generating a nutrition analysis out of that program, and then entering it into the tracking database. Lots of work, and of course I never actually make anything the same way twice.

But I think I'll stick with the very limited induction program for another week. I'll add in some lemon juice as an ingredient, almonds as a snack, and give myself a one time treat this weekend of blueberries in creme fraiche.  Then decide what to do the week after that.