Juices 1 / 4 cup lemon juice 1 / 4 cup lime juice 1 / 2 cup tomato juice
Convenience Foods
You can select from the variety of convenience foods( bars and shakes are the two most available), but be sure to determine the actual number of digestible carbohydrate in any particular product( see Chapter 8, page 77).
===================================================================== Time to Retest
Chances are you are feeling great, and you ' ll feel even better when you see evidence of the good things that are happening inside you. That ' s why I recommend you now repeat the blood and other medical tests you had done before you began Atkins( but not sooner than six weeks after your first tests). Do not repeat the GTT at this point.
What will you find? Your lipid profile should have done an about-face. If your total cholesterol was over 200, you should see a significant drop. If not, check for a dramatic increase in HDL( good cholesterol). You ' ll want to know your HDL and LDL( bad cholesterol) levels now, anyway, to see how they ' ve changed. Your heart risk is dramatically decreased when your HDL has gone up relative to your LDL. The probability is that both will have moved in the proper directions. Relish these positive findings: A vast number of people in this country has to take medications with unpleasant side effects to get this kind of improvement in cholesterol levels.
Even more significant are your triglycerides. Elevated triglyceride levels, especially when combined with low levels of HDL cholesterol, have been shown in well-conducted studies to be the most important combination of heart-disease risk factors ever discovered.
If your triglyceride level was originally elevated, or even high-normal( anything above 100 increases the risk of heart disease), it will have almost certainly plummeted dramatically. Drops of between forty and eighty percent are commonplace for someone doing Atkins, as they should be. After all, stored fat is made up of triglycerides, and Atkins focuses on burning stored fat for energy. If you don ' t get such a response, make sure you are doing the program correctly, or else repeat the test, making sure you wait fourteen hours after your last meal before the blood is drawn.
If your cholesterol has not improved to a level that represents reduced risk factors, yet you were satisfied with your weight reduction and other physical improvements, continue to do Atkins, take the cholesterollowering nutritional supplements outlined on page 309( also refer to Dr. Atkins ' Vita-Nutrient Solution) and repeat the test in a month. Continue to get retested every three months until the figures are satisfactory, then have them checked only annually. =====================================================================
Now that you ' ve moved on from the simplicity of the Induction phase of Atkins, why don ' t you get yourself a little notebook and keep track of the food you eat daily? With more choices, you ' ll to some degree need to replace your willpower with your brains. The more you know about the carbohydrate quantities of foods you eat, or want to eat, the better equipped you will be to plan an effective weight loss strategy.
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