The procedure is very simple; all you have to do is eat healthy and eat as much as you want, but in portions.

To follow this diet plan, all you have to do is make a healthy choice for breakfast which should include milk and egg.

For your lunch, you can eat anything you like except for fried and junk food. For example, if you make a choice of eating chicken, divide it into three portions. Eat one portion at lunch time and eat other half portion after an hour and again eat last portion after an hour. This will help to increase your metabolism and your food will easily digest within hours.

Follow the same scheme for your dinner and supper. With this plan, you can sometimes consume large quantities of the food you like but dividing it in portions.

Along with this plan, workout for at least half an hour is very important and like all other diets and plans, drinking water in sufficient quantity is very important.

When you try to consume your food after an interval of one hour, you will not only feel light, but you will notice that you are losing weight without skipping meals. This will help you to remain filled for long and will not affect your health.

And most importantly, you are losing weight by eating sufficiently ; this is one of the best path that you could follow to lose weight.

Make sure you take guidance from your doctor or physicians too before you start practicing this weight control dietary plan.

The culprits, he uncovered, are the carbohydrates. Those building blocks turn into glucose and if we do not use all of that energy on physical activity, it turns into fat and accumulates in our bodies.

Therefore his diet is based on a few or no carbohydrates at all. You can eat as much proteins (meat and animal products) as you like and you can eat as much fat as you like, as long as you avoid carbohydrates you will lose weight.

The diet was based on proteins; bacon is OK, huge steaks are OK, creams, cheeses are OK and you can eat as much of it as you want. Eliminate the flower, rice, sugars and other carbohydrates from your food and you will lose weight.

Low and behold it worked! People were losing weight in huge amounts while gorging on their favorite foods and Dr. Atkins became the talk of the town.

The diet calls for a ridiculously small amount of carbohydrate for the first two weeks, about 20 grams a day (one slice of bread has about 18gr.) and no fruit at all because they are high in carbohydrates and sugars.

After the initial two weeks and after you have lost 4-8 pounds a week, you can slowly and carefully increase the amount of carbohydrates until you stop losing weight. That is your plateau, your base line and now you know what your limit is and reduce the intake in order to lose weight. You can also check the amount of ketosis in your urine which is an indication that your body is burning the fat it has been storing.

The problem with this diet is two pronged ; you deny yourself some foods and you start craving them after a while. There’s a risk you will go off the diet and start eating carbohydrates. Together with the fat you’ve been eating it is a recipe for an immediate weigh gain.
The more serious problem is the cholesterol which you have been consuming in big quantities.

It has been known for years that cholesterol is a major factor in heart attacks and cardiovascular system problems and is altogether dangerous to your health. Indeed when Dr. Atkins stepped out of his office in New York, in April 2003, slipped on the ice and fell; he died 9 days later at the age of 72. His cause of death was characterized as “blunt impact injury of the head” but subsequent reports show he had congestive heart failure and his weight at the time of death would have made him obese.

Since his death, although his wife tried to continue with his institute and diet empire, the popularity of this diet has declines dramatically, and it is the least recommended diet by doctors and health professionals.

Their plan is simple and comprehensive. It involves a little work from the dieter, but it is not overwhelming. The plan utilizes nutrition, psychology and support systems that together help the dieter achieve his goal.
They have a few plans. Here is the most popular one which is called the point system.

What do you eat? Basically everything. Each food gets points assigned to it based on the carbohydrate contents, fat content and fiber content. You get a small paper calculator and with a sliding center you can check the amount of points the food you are about to eat, gets.

You are also assigned, based on your weight and the amount of pounds (or Kg) you want to lose, the number of points you should eat each day.

It’s up to the dieter to decide what and how much he eats as long as he does not exceed the points allowed. So if you crave chocolate you can eat it, but know that you have to eat zero or low points food for the rest of the day.
This is a psychological break through. You do not have to deny yourself the food you like the most. You can eat everything – in small portions.

The second part of this program is to write everything down. We often feel we don’t eat much and yet the weight keeps going up. Writing down everything you eat makes you aware of what you put in your mouth and you might discover the “nothing” you ate is actually quite a lot. It is an excellent way to control your food instead of it controlling you.

The third part of this program is the weekly weigh-ins. You are asked not to weigh yourself every day. Our weight fluctuates because of different reasons; water retention, meal just consumed, constipation. This daily ritual is unnerving and disappointing at times. What you are asked to do instead is to come to their centers once a week and they will weigh you. No cheating, no leaning forward or back. The same scale once a week. Your weight is written down in a little booklet you keep, and you can watch the pound go away.

Following the weigh-ins there are support meetings run by their counselors. In those meetings you get together with people in the same situation as you and you share complaints and advice. The counselor follows a program which explains the basis of nutrition and teaches you ways to shave points off your diet by using substitutes and sharing recipes.

The best thing about this plan is that it is sustainable for a long period of time. Since you are the judge of what you eat and don’t deny yourself the foods you crave, you can continue on the plan for a long time. The goal is to lose no more than 2-3 pounds a week (about 1 kg.). It becomes a way of life and a way to control your weight forever.

The idea behind this diet is the glycemic cycle happening in our bodies when we eat. When we consume sugars and carbohydrates, the body produces insulin to break the sugars down. The more sugars we eat, the more insulin is produced.

The doctor theorized that this causes a cycle; we eat sugars, insulin breaks it down and when there is no more sugar to break down, we feel hungry and eat again. If we prevent the spike in insulin production we will avoid the hunger feeling that causes us to eat more of that same food.

People have been confusing this diet with a low-carbohydrate diet such as Dr. Atkins, but it is not the same. You are not ask to forgo carbohydrates all together, rather choose complex carbs, such as beans, vegetables and whole grain rice and flower, which makes the body work longer and harder to break down. Same thing happens with regard to fat.

Do not avoid fat all together, like many popular, health oriented diets (such as the Pritikin diet) have advocated, rather choose the Good Fat – unsaturated fat and foods rich in omega 3 oil (fish). His diet was a new way of healthy living rather than a diet you do only to lose weight.

The plan calls for three phases; the first phase takes two weeks. No sugars, no processed carbohydrates, no fruit and no vegetables high in sugars (such as beets and carrots) are allowed. No alcohol of any kind either. The purpose of this phase is to re-train the body to produce less and less insulin and get you off the craving for carbohydrates. What you are losing in this first phase is mainly water, so you have to be careful not to get your electrolytes out of balance.

Phase two continues as long as you want to lose weight. It reintroduces fruit, vegetables and some complex carbohydrates, such whole grains but still avoids sugar.

Phase three of this diet is the one you will stay on for the rest of your life. There is no list of allowed or not allowed foods. You are expected to understand and feel in your body what causes your insulin to spike and avoid those foods.

In 2004, Kraft Food Company came out with a line of prepackaged food along the guidelines of the South Beach Diet, and called it South Beach Living. It includes whole grain, whole rice foods with complex carbohydrates and complex sugars and meant to help you stay healthy and lean for many years to come.

The solution – they will make the food for you according to healthy, low fat, low carbohydrate guidelines, and will deliver the prepackaged food to your home. It takes the guessing, measuring, counting and preparing of the food out of the equation. All you have to do is eat their food, supplement it with fresh fruit and vegetables and lose the weight.

Both diet plans are almost the same and they guarantee that you will lose the weight if you follow their regiment.

It works well if you do as they say and don’t “sin” by snacking on additional foods. The problem arises when you realize what you getting and how much it costs.
The portions are very small. They say this is the right amount you should be eating, but your stomach, used to much more food in a single day, might tell you otherwise. Theoretically you should be able to keep away hunger by adding vegetables but when you are at home, by your refrigerator, what is there to stop you?

Maybe the price. It costs about two hundred of dollars a week to have three meals a day delivered. If you are a busy person who doesn’t have time, or doesn’t like to cook, this is a perfect solution. Just pop the package in the microwave and you have a balanced meal that is good for you, and will make you lose the pounds. So you won’t get bored both companies have big enough menus you can choose from, diversify the meal and eat only the things you like.

The question is how long are you willing to eat foods out of a container? No restaurants while on the diet, no eating dinner with friends. You have to stick to what they give you or the moment you go off the plan the pounds come back very quickly. You have not learned anything new and haven’t changed the way you eat.

So, as a quick fix, it works well. For the long run and for eating healthy for the rest of your life (like the other diets suggest) it doesn’t work at all. You need to work out on Balanced Meal instead !