personal care, Gordon reached his goal weight for the first time in thirty years, and he no longer feels driven to consume sugar.
Gordon had failed repeatedly on low-fat / low-calorie diets. And that ' s not surprising. His problem lay in his metabolic response to carbohydrates. To solve an out-of-control situation like this by restricting calories without restricting carbohydrates is like marching into the surf planning to turn back the ocean.
You may have picked up this book with the secret inner conviction that you ' re a " compulsive eater." In all probability, you ' re a carbohydrate addict. How many compulsive eaters of steaks have you come across? Not too many, huh? Let me tell you, it ' s a rare breed.
Many people ate a so-called " balanced " diet as children, but by the time they reached adulthood their diets had become progressively less balanced. Eating didn ' t seem all that important to them once, but now it does. So they look at their waistlines, they look at their eating and they realize they have a problem. Usually they notice that their taste in food has gone off in a specific direction. Carbohydrates now form the bulk of what they eat: breads and baked goods, cakes and candies, pasta and popcorn. Surprising and illogical food cravings are typical. Do you ever have dinner with a big dessert and almost immediately afterward find that you want some candy? That ' s a sign, as is fatigue, that your carbohydrate metabolism is out of whack.
It ' s not that you eat when you ' re not hungry, but you seem to be always hungry. And yet when you eat the high-carbohydrate food you crave, you feel better only briefly. Your situation is the exact opposite of the one you ' ll experience when you do Atkins. When doing Atkins, you ' ll find that your appetite has diminished, but your satisfaction from the food you eat has increased.
Are You a Compulsive Eater?
Many carbohydrate addicts could no more walk past a refrigerator without opening it than Venus or Serena Williams could let a short lob drift overhead without smashing it. I ' ve heard many patients say, " It ' s irresistible, Dr. Atkins. I ' m a slave. How can you possibly help me?"
I say, " That ' s all right. Your compulsions hold no terrors for me, and soon they won ' t for you. When you pass that refrigerator, open it, have some chicken salad or a slice of pot roast. If you eat the way I ' m asking you to eat, you ' ll find that food is still delicious, but the compulsions will fade."
You see, your food compulsion isn ' t a character disorder, it ' s a chemical disorder called hyperinsulinism, and you have it simply because you ' ve eaten the same unhealthy way that most people in our culture do.
Rebecca Chasen liked baking breads and desserts for her friends. She liked eating that way, too. She had been large since childhood. Now, at age 32, she was carrying 264 pounds on her five-foot eleven-and-a-half-inch frame.
One day, she decided to try on an old pair of pants and found she couldn ' t bring the button within four inches of the hole. That same week someone at work told her he had lost 50 pounds doing Atkins. Rebecca had tried herbal diets, low-fat diets, the cabbage soup diet(" I was starving ") and Fen-Phen(" I thought my heart was going to explode and so I stopped ") over the previous decade. It was time for something completely different.
" I was a carbohydrate junkie, so adjusting to Atkins was hard. I desperately wanted bread for the first four days. I struggled to ignore the cravings, and after two weeks I had lost 17 pounds. My size 22 jeans, which were tight before, were now loose."
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