Dr. Atkins' New Diet Cookbook (3 page)

Scallions

Snow Pea Pods

Spaghetti Squash

Spinach

String or Wax Beans

Summer Squash

Tomato

Turnips

Water Chestnuts

Zucchini Squash

Anchovies

Crumbled Crisp Bacon

Grated Cheese

Minced Hard-Boiled Egg Yolk

Minced Sautéed Mushrooms

Sour Cream

All spices to taste, but make sure sugar is not in the seasoning.

Many fats, especially certain oils, are essential to good nutrition. Include a source of GLA (gamma-linolenic acid) and omega-3 oils (EPA, salmon oil, linseed oil). Olive oil (monounsaturated) is valuable. All vegetable oils are allowed. The best are canola, walnut, soybean, sesame, sunflower, and safflower oils, especially if they are labeled “cold pressed.” Butter is allowed; margarine is not. Margarine should be avoided not because of its carbohydrate content but because it is a potential health hazard. Mayonnaise is permitted unless you are on a yeast restriction. The fat that is part of the meat or fowl you eat is permitted.

Avoid the seeming paradox provided by today’s “diet foods.” Understand why cream is allowed but not skim milk, why sour cream can be used but not yogurt, why low-fat chicken breading is not allowed even though chicken may be pan-fried. The answer common to all of these seeming inconsistencies lies in the higher carbohydrate content of the low-fat dieter’s foods.

Dieters must determine which artificial sweeteners agree with them, but the following are allowed: saccharine, aspartame, acesulfame-K.
Sweeteners such as sorbitol, mannitol, and other hexitols are not allowed, nor are any natural sweeteners ending in the letters -ose, such as maltose, fructose, and so on.

1. Note that the 14-day diet contains no fruit, bread, grains, starchy vegetables, dairy products other than cheese, cream, or butter.

2. Avoid diet products unless they specifically state “no carbohydrates.” Most dietetic foods are for fat-restricted, not carbohydrate-restricted, diets.

3. The word sugarless is not sufficient. The product must state the carbohydrate content, and that’s what you go by.

4. Many products you do not normally think of as foods such as chewing gum, cough syrups, and cough drops are filled with sugar and other caloric sweeteners and must be avoided.

You won’t need to do the Induction diet for more than a couple of weeks. By that time, I feel confident that you’ll not only be losing weight but feeling healthier than you have in years. Most people feel energized by a low-carbohydrate diet. On the weight-loss front, most of you will have seen five to ten pounds disappear, and that means you can now liberalize your intake of carbohydrate slightly. You’ve begun the Ongoing Weight-Loss diet, which will carry you pleasantly along for as many weeks or months as it takes to get you very close to your ideal weight.

This minor liberalization of carbohydrate is, of course, not an invitation to go back to eating the way you did before. What, in fact, you’ll be doing is increasing the daily amount of carbohydrate by 5 grams at a time. You’ll do this very gradually because you don’t want to fall out of ketosis/lipolysis. I suggest that each week you increase your daily carbohydrate consumption by 5 grams. Typical 5-gram increments are 10 Brazil nuts or 20 macadamias, or half of an avocado or half a tomato, or 3 ounces of plain, unflavored yogurt, or ⅔ of a cup of string beans or broccoli or 2½ wafers of GG Bran Crispbread.

Those of you who have been chafing at the absolute restriction of alcohol on the induction diet might now add 4 ounces of dry wine or 6 ounces of a light beer, or 1 ounce of whiskey or gin daily.

Of course, as you increase your carbohydrate consumption, you will see a gradual decrease in your rate of weight loss. That’s fine. The purpose of this diet is not to lose weight in a hurry, but to get it off and
keep it off
. By slowing down your rate of loss, you go gradually toward your ultimate diet.

The Premaintenance diet is a further extension of the diet liberalization that you went toward on the Ongoing Weight-Loss diet. When you’re getting fairly close to your ultimate goal weight, it’s very important that you lose weight slowly. Many of you are such determined dieters that this will be psychologically burdensome. You’ve got that final five or six pounds to go, you know you can do it in two weeks, why postpone success? Sorry, folks, that’s not the best way to proceed. I think you should carve off those final pounds over the course of two or three months. Here’s why.

The biggest problem with weight control is not the losing but the maintenance. How many celebrity dieters have you heard of who lost their weight in a crash program and then gained it back faster than they lost it? What you should do is just the opposite. Lose those final pounds with excruciating slowness so that by the time you say, “I’m there!” you’ll be virtually eating your lifetime diet.

As for doing Premaintenance, it’s simple. Either add another 10 grams of carbohydrate a day to what you’ve been eating on Ongoing Weight-Loss, or give yourself a 20-gram carbohydrate treat two or three times a week. You can even touch some forbidden starches. A bagel, a baked potato, some French toast, a slice of pizza, a side dish of lasagna. Or else add some of your favorite fruits—apples, oranges, grapefruits, peaches, bananas. As long as you don’t start gaining weight but continue to lose at an almost imperceptible rate, you’re doing fine.

Now that you’ve arrived, offer yourself some well-deserved self-congratulation, and prepare for a slim lifetime.

As you already know, there’s no shortage of delicious food for you to eat. The one scientific fact of importance that you must be aware of, however, is that once you’ve totally stopped your weight loss, your appetite will increase toward its normal level. For this reason, your lifetime maintenance diet will still be fairly restrictive of carbohydrate foods.

You’ll need to find your own level, and that level will be what I call your Critical Carbohydrate Level for Maintenance. This is the level
above
which you
gain
weight. At this level, you will have enough carbohydrate restriction to keep
some
curbing of your appetite, and, for most of you, this will range between 40 and 90 grams of carbohydrate a day. Still considerably less than the average American consumption of 300 grams a day!

Here are my final suggestions for you happy dieters who have now reached your ideal weight.

1. Be food aware—meat, fish, fowl, nuts, seeds, vegetables, and occasional fruits and starches are the foods nature designed you to eat. Avoid processed foods. Eat fresh and natural to the best of your ability.

2. Avoid sugar and corn syrup and white flour and cornstarch like the plague. For most people these are the foods of overweight and ill health.

3. Individualize your diet. Try new foods. Create the diet that’s right for you.

4. Consider the program of vitamin and mineral supplementation that’s explained in Appendix 1 and that you’ve been using while you were on the weight-loss portion of the diet.

5. Use caffeine and alcohol in moderation.

6. If you regain more than five pounds of weight go right back to the Induction diet. Within two weeks you should find yourself back at your ideal weight.

7. Please do exercise. Though there isn’t time to talk about it here, it’s wonderful for health and very helpful in maintaining slimness.

Now for a final word about eating. . . .

I can’t guarantee that I’ll make you wealthy and wise, but I have every intention of making you happy in your body. That doesn’t just mean slim, it also means healthy and thrilled by the food you eat. It’s simply essential that your foods thrill you. If they don’t, how can I fulfill my promise that for you the Atkins diet will be a lifetime diet?

I want your new meals to provide you with every bit as much emotional satisfaction and eating happiness as your normal pre-Atkins way of eating did. Hopefully more. If we succeed at this, then
there will be no reason for you to return to your old way of eating—the way that didn’t work.

If you follow the suggestions that that ever-so-talented food wizard, Fran Gare, has prepared for you in this book, you will probably end up much better at cooking than you were before. This is no small advantage. Add to that the fact that on the Atkins maintenance diet, you will be eating sufficient fat to produce satiety and avoid disruptive blood sugar patterns, and I think you’re an odds-on favorite to succeed.

Let me give you a dieting tip. One of the advantages of fat in your diet is that it buffers your changing blood sugar levels, it prevents swift, disturbing changes, and it thereby suppresses the craving for sweets. The successful effort to lower the amount of fat in the American diet over the past two decades has been bought at a crippling price. During this same period the American consumption of sugar has increased by 20 pounds yearly. That’s not only a catastrophe for dieters but a catastrophe for health.

You may have heard of the French paradox. The French consume more fat than Americans (including four times as much butter and twice as much cheese), but they have less than half our heart attack rate. How can this be? It demands an answer, and the theorists of low fat have done a spectacularly ineffectual job of providing one. But the true answer is evident. We eat three times as much sugar as the French, and the research linking sugar to excess insulin production to heart disease is strong and growing stronger.

So don’t be afraid of fat. Not only can you use it for weight loss, you can eat it in good health. The Atkins diet is not a high-fat diet since many of the junk food sources of fat are not permitted on it, but it is a diet that’s unafraid of fat. The lifetime maintenance diet that will keep you slim is natural for human beings and well suited to the improvement of your health.

As you succeed on the Atkins diet and eat the scrumptious recipes Fran Gare has prepared for you, there will be one final question you’ll have to ask yourself: Am I happier eating this way than I was before? Personally, I think nothing compares with smelling a delectable main course sizzling in the frying pan and experiencing appetite combined with the sure and certain knowledge that appetite is shortly to be gratified.

On many other diets people are asked, “Are you satisfied with the food?” and often they’ll reply, “Oh, yes, I’m satisfied.” All too often, these responses fail the acid test of dieting: The hopeful dieters who
made them end up gaining their weight back and resuming their former eating patterns.