Chapter 1
Lose Weight, Look Great, and Enjoy Your Food
by Robert C. Atkins, M.D.
Suppose you love food -- everybody does -- and yet you have weight to lose and weight to keep off. And you love not just any food, but mouth-watering, rich, and satisfying food. You're facing a dilemma -- a choice between looking and feeling great or eating well.
You can have both. Using this very special cookbook, food lovers will learn to create sumptuous dishes and lose weight while making garden-variety dieters envious. You will enjoy all the things that other diets told you to avoid. What's more, the recipes in this book have such universal appeal that you can use them for a dinner party and no one will guess you are on a diet -- unless, of course, you choose to share with them the "secret" that no one else seems to know:
The secret is the Atkins diet.
The Atkins diet is not just another novelty diet; it is not simply one of your many dieting options. It is so different from other approaches to losing weight that you cannot help but feel "this can't be true!"
But I'll wager that most of you who read my book Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, and tried the diet, smile when you hear such disbelief. You know from experience that what I say is true. For those of you not as familiar with it, the Atkins diet is specifically geared to correct the metabolic imbalance that causes people to become overweight.
Excess weight, especially a significant degree of it, represents an identifiable metabolic disorder called hyperinsulinism. Blood tests will show if you have it. And if you do, you can correct it -- actually bypass it -- by sharply cutting down on your carbohydrate intake. The reason: Insulin floods the bloodstream only when carbohydrates are consumed, so eliminate carbohydrates and you completely bypass your insulin problem. As a hyperinsulinism victim, you are metabolically quite normal unless and until you take in carbohydrates.
Getting your carbohydrate intake down to nearly zero induces your body to put out a biochemical symphony of fat-mobilizing chemicals. When they build up in your bloodstream, as they do whenever you go forty-eight hours or more without carbohydrates, you will normalize your blood sugar, have more energy, and be much less hungry. Because your hunger will be so reduced, the food you eat will fill and satisfy you. And yet, simultaneously, you will be losing weight rather rapidly -- at a rate that usually occurs only on some kind of starvation diet. Even more curious, you'll be taking off inches from where you most want to give up unwanted fat.
Despite the medical truth of these principles, we live in an age where the low-fat "fad" diet has become so popular that very few people question it. The low-fat diet has even become the standard diet. Restaurants, cookbook authors, and dietitians, among others, have tried to convince us that a low-fat diet is, or can be made to be, satisfying.
But is food as enjoyable and fulfilling as it was in the "good old days"? Not to me, that's for sure. The restaurants I grew up with don't exist as they did; they don't make the same succulent dishes they used to serve. The dells whose corned beef won "Best in the City" awards years ago now offer a fat-trimmed variant that's not worth eating. And yet the magazines and newspapers rave about this fat-free, stripped-down "cuisine" with such unbridled enthusiasm that I wonder if "gourmet" and "masochist" have now become synonymous. No matter what other recipe books claim, fat-free foods just taste different. There is no delicious substitute for heavy cream, pâté, or bacon. The low-fat creations just don't work because fat creates, translates, and intensifies flavor, and is what makes you feel sated and full. Your body can't be fooled, nor can your taste buds.
For any diet to be successful, it must be a lifetime eating plan. The metabolic imbalance leading to being overweight doesn't go away, so your diet must master it forever. But other cookbooks expect you to live the rest of your life eating bland fat-free foods. Imagine a life without real butter, real cream, real steak. That is why so many other diets fail. The requirements are so stringent and so boring that no one can bear to stay on them.
This book is designed to be a guide for you, a guide to a revolution in eating -- a new diet revolution. Using the recipes in this extraordinary book, you will cook and enjoy eating real foods. Written by low-carbohydrate gourmet Veronica Atkins, my wife, these recipes rival those of any restaurant or gourmet magazine. When you taste her creations, you will become fully aware of just what you have been missing. You will be clued into a most fascinating paradox: Diet food can be better, richer, and more sumptuous than most everyday foods.
And because sitting down to dinner together is precious time for any family, Veronica has ingeniously created mouth-watering meals that can be prepared in thirty minutes or less. This will allow you to focus on the good food and wonderful companionship when enjoying meals with your family and friends. And isn't that what eating should really be about?
Copyright © 1997 by Robert C. Atkins, M.D., and Veronica Atkins