Weight Loss Techniques - Is Atkins Diet Safe?

The Atkins Diet has been around for ages, but it has gained significant popularity just over the last several years. Despite this much popularity, as with many low carbohydrate diets, the Atkins Diet has been the subject of a lot of controversy.

Many doctors, especially cardiologists, argue the safety of the Atkins diet. On this diet a person is allowed to eat, virtually, unlimited amounts of many fatty foods. One can have bacon and eggs every morning for breakfast, and just have to skip the toast and hash browned potatoes. It would not be uncommon, on the Atkins Diet, to fry up a juicy cheeseburger for dinner, as long as one tosses the bun and fries out the door.

The upside to passing on carbohydrates is that the body is forced to feast on the fats for energy and the person loses weight. However, these weight loss results in what most doctors would consider a toxic state, ketosis. This is actually a goal on the Atkins Diet. But with no carbohydrates to fill the stomach up, a person is obviously going to eat more of what he or she allowed, fat. So while one may lose a significant amount of weight on the Atkins Diet, the artery clogging, fatty foods that he or she is subjecting their body to on a daily basis can catch up to them before knowing it. The question is whether the health benefit of the weight they are losing is going to outweigh the potential health risks in the future. The data is merely not available to weigh the long term risks of the Atkins Diet, so one can eat at his or her own risk on this one.

In fact the Atkins Diet Seems To Never Go Away. Fad diets come and go, but The Atkins Diet, a low-carbohydrate, high-protein weight loss plan, seems never to go away, no matter how many medical professionals denounce it. Even according to some Doctors the weight loss one can see in low-carbohydrate diets is not all that much better as low-carbohydrate diets have been linked to increased frequency of colon cancer, formation of kidney stones, kidney disease, and even osteoporosis. Also some consider the drawback to the low-carbohydrate diet is its severely limited menu options as they feel at first, eggs and bacon in butter for breakfast every day is fun, but day after day of only meat and fat at every meal can get tiresome.

So there are the controversies around Atkins Diet. On one hand people have lots of stories of significant weight loss on a relatively user-friendly diet; on the other, they have dietitians and nutritionists who maintain that the weight loss produced is short-term and can threaten a person's overall health, despite the fact that the weight loss itself may have the beneficial effect of lowering cholesterol.

Now maybe both sides are right. Atkins Diet provides weight loss at a very high cost to overall health, or at least that has been the prevailing medical opinion. Low Carbohydrate Diet may not be as good as one may think but there have been reports in the medical literature that say that this low-carbohydrate diet may not be as bad as one thinks. That makes people interested again in Atkins Diet diet, but until there is more research on what stresses the diet places on the body, there is no way to know what it might be doing besides providing short-term weight loss.