Is This Shocking to You?

Is This Shocking to You?
If it is, you're entirely normal. It contradicts the mythology that says the only way to be fit, slim, and healthy is to pursue low-fat dieting first, last and always. That mythology is based on some well- observed scientific facts poorly interpreted. This mythology is mostly harmful, because a low-fat diet, which allows you to eat sugar, white flour, and other processed junk food, isn't healthy at all. And a low-fat diet, which can be healthy if it excludes junk, when extremely low is simply too austere for most people and infinitely more austere than the Atkins diet.
I also shouldn't have to tell you that moderate low-fat dieting-like the low-calorie dieting that preceded it- is a total failure when it comes to weight control. The facts bear it out, providing mute testimony to the low-fat fanaticism's frightening escalation of the obesity problem. In the decade between the mid-80s and mid-90s the percentage of daily calories of fat fell from 40% to 33%. But in that same time span, significant obesity rose from the 25% level it had maintained for 30 years, to 33%. For a nation the size of the U.S., that's 20 million new cases.
Needless to say, an unacceptably small number of dieters have been able to use fat restriction to lose weight. But for those who do, it has proven to be a complete wipeout for permanent weight loss. So big a wipeout that it's a major national embarrassment. On calorie-restrictive and/or low-fat diets, only three to five percent of dieters succeed in keeping their excess pounds off.
All you experienced dieters know that the test of a good diet is keeping the weight off. Any diet vigorously pursued can take those ounces and inches off initially. But once a low-calories/low-fat dieter can no longer tolerate the biological gap between hunger and fulfillment found on such diets, what a rebound follows.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of these committed to following the Atkins diet have had little or no difficulty in maintaining their ideal weight loss.
Whenever I talk about diet on my daily radio show in New York City, people call me up to tell me they've been on the diet for five years, or ten, or twenty, and they feel great. Fat? No, it never came back. I smile and congratulate them. And inside, I'm chuckling merrily. Whay they're telling me is that it's not just my own patients who've succeeded on the Atkins diet.
But then, dieting success on a properly managed low-carbohydrate diet is almost inescapable.