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By Mary Carmichael
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Try as she did with traditional healthy eating, Adele Gubic just couldn't seem to lose weight after her third pregnancy. So when she heard about the Atkins diet two years ago, it seemed like a godsend. She bought "the books and the tapes and the cookbooks" and ordered low-carbohydrate soy products online. Sure enough, 12 pounds melted off her 156-pound frame in eight weeks. "It does come off amazingly if you do what you're supposed to do," she says.
The problem was, she didn't. Two months into the regimen, Gubic, like most Atkins dieters, started having serious starch and sugar cravings. She had passed the initial "induction" phase of Atkins, which prohibits almost everything except meat, eggs and cheese. But she hadn't reached the "lifetime maintenance" phase, the ideal-weight stage that allows plenty of fruits and vegetables and even an occasional cheat. As she added more and more carbs back into her daily diet, already stuffed with meats and cheeses, it became clear she'd never get there. Four months after she started Atkins, she had gained 16 pounds--more than she'd lost. "The diet didn't teach me about healthy eating. In a way, it hurt me," she says. "I hadn't learned anything about portion control, and it was so strict. I couldn't live on just meat."
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Neither could Dennis Fish (net gain: seven pounds), or many of the hapless dieters who've hopped on the Atkins bandwagon only to find themselves gaining weight. Atkins offers a luxury most diets don't: near-unlimited fat consumption. "On Atkins you can eat 16 bags of pork rinds if you want," says Fish. But, he adds, there's hardly any room for starchy and sugary goodies. Many other diets can absorb small slip-ups. But on Atkins, dieters are expected to shift their metabolism into a fat-burning state that's easily broken by semi-regular cheating. "An occasional piece of bread or birthday cake is not going to ruin your diet," says Colette Heimowitz, Atkins Health & Medical Information Services' director of education and research. "But you're going to lose some serious fat burning for a couple of days. And if you give in once, then it's once a week, it's twice a week, and all of a sudden you're right back where you started." Or, in some cases, worse off.
Heimowitz points out that regular cheaters aren't really on Atkins to begin with. "You can't blame the program if you're cheating and not succeeding," she says. She adds that there's little reason to cheat; since Adele Gubic's attempt at soy-fueled weight loss, a wider variety of tasty carb-substitute foods has come to market. But they, too, are potential pitfalls--particularly because many are low in carbs but high in calories. Although early studies at Harvard have shown that calorie control isn't as crucial to Atkins as it is to other diets, it still matters. And it's easy to overindulge on Atkins's own high-calorie sweet treats. Even the bread and butter of the Atkins diet--meat--can cause weight gain if dieters don't exercise restraint. "We don't tell people to go eat a whole turkey," Heimowitz says."We're not an excuse to gorge."
So what's a dieter to do? For some, the answer is renewed vigilance and more emphasis on Atkins-friendly fruits and veggies. For others, traditional programs might work better. Certainly, it's clear that Atkins isn't as easy as last year's hype suggested. Since leaving Atkins for, respectively, Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig--which focus more on portion control than eliminating food categories--Fish and Gubic have each lost 30 pounds. "The food I eat now is balanced," Gubic says. "I never feel cheated at all." That's much better than always feeling like a cheater.
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