In fact, in the ten years since the first edition of this book was published, one of my personal wishes has been granted. Today, a person choosing to follow a controlled carbohydrate nutritional approach has almost as many packaged and prepared food options as people who are, unwittingly, following a low-fat diet. Visit your local natural food store, drug store, supermarket or even mass market store and you will see the wide variety of food products available to someone who understands the benefits of controlled carbohydrate nutrition. Advances in scientific understanding have paved the way for alternatives to foods that are high in carbohydrates, foods such as pasta, bread, muffins, cakes, candy and even ice cream, not to mention the wide variety of energy bars and ready-to-drink shakes.
On all four phases of Atkins, you select from an increasingly liberal array of foods that are sources of the healthy carbohydrates. Your overall intake of them also gradually increases. Once you ' ve reached your goal weight, you can eat larger helpings of healthy carbohydrate foods, as long as you stay below the Critical Carbohydrate Level for Maintenance( CCLM), which will be explained in Chapters 16 and 17. In simple terms, this means knowing and adhering to a threshold of carbohydrate intake that allows you to neither gain nor lose weight. It ' s worth mentioning that each person has an individual threshold depending upon age, level of physical activity and other factors.
===================================================================== Changes in How We Eat
Look at the correlation between the decline in fat consumption and the increase in carbohydrate consumption. The pendulum began to swing toward fat restriction in 1975, and for the next twenty years, Americans began to gain weight at an alarming rate( see the following graphs).
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