Atkins Diet: 2 years later
In summary, for those that don’t want to read the whole thing, in total I lost 51 pounds. If your thinking about trying it… read on.
Roughly two years ago, after hearing various successes from a friend or two about their experiences with the Atkins Diet I decided to give it a try myself. At the time I was weighing in at 198 lbs. Every “ideal weight” calculator told me I should weigh about 145lbs. I would agree with them as that is how much I weighed when I got married (25 years ago) and I was happy with my weight and looked pretty good.
I started the diet on August 17, 2003. The first two or three weeks were tough because, honestly, I didn’t have any ideas what to eat. The book gives you some ideas but those meals didn’t really fit into my lifestyle. I mean, I have a wife and kids that weren’t doing Atkins so I could not force them to eat the same way. I found my self eating whatever I could find; hot dogs with mayo wrapped in lettuce, pickles, olives, eggs. Kind of crappy. No real meals to speak of.
With the initial drop in blood sugar, I was craving sweets really bad! I was desperate for a Twinkie! It only lasted a day or two. My best advice to get over that hump is to get really full on the things your allowed to eat, even if you go over your carb allowance for the day just so your full and don’t want to eat.
Anyway, after a month, I had lost 15 pounds and my wife was impressed that 1) I was actually able to stick with it and 2) I was actually losing a noticeable amount of weight and it showed. I needed to buy my first set of smaller clothes and boy, that’s when everyone will notice that you are losing weight! At that point, my wife decided to do the Atkins Diet with me.
Once my wife was on-board with me, I actually started eating very nice meals that she would make. Absolutely awesome salads such as her great Chinese chicken salad with home made sugar-free dressing. Mmmm I could eat that every night. She just figured out the recipe on her own. I’ll post it if anyone is interested.
When Thanksgiving rolled around, I thought I would have a heck of a time staying on track but we found lots of recipes on the Atkins.com web site to try. To be honest, the ones we tried were not very good. I think when your mind is expecting one thing, anything else will not be the same. But, I stayed on track and continued on through Christmas pretty much without any problems.
By January, just over 4 months, I had lost most of the weight: 33 lbs. I was still in the weight loss phase, very gradually increasing my carbohydrate intake. By August I was down to 147, just over 50 pounds lost and, seriously, it was easy. The picture in my profile was taken in July at this point.
Here’s the catch and I think this might be what messes people up. You see, you spend a lot of time at the end slowly increasing the number of carbohydrates you consume. The problem is I didn’t stop! You see, the weight wasn’t coming back on as I continued to increase the carbs and at some point I just stopped counting. I never over did it but I was definitely eating more carbs than I should have.
At the beginning of this week, (28 Nov ’05) after my vacation in Arizona and Thanksgiving I weighed in at 164 lbs. I had put those pounds on over the last year or so.
I had decided that after Thanksgiving was over and was back from my vacation I was going back on induction to get back on track. I started on Monday and have already lost 4 pounds over the last 5 days. Not too shabby. I’ll let you know how it goes.
