How to Create an Atkins Diet Menu Plan

Atkins is a reduced carbohydrate diet that can help with reducing and successfully maintaining a healthy weight. It's a lifestyle change, so menu planning is essential to help you create meals within the range of allowable carbohydrates. It's important to your success to create a menu plan specific to your stage in the Atkins plan.

Things You'll Need

• Atkins diet book
• Atkins-friendly recipes and food lists

Tips For You

1. Determine your total carbohydrate range. Atkins has different phases of the diet so if you are unsure of your allowable carbohydrate amount, consult your Atkins book or the Atkins website for help.
2. Research lower and good carbohydrate foods and recipes. You want a range of food so you don't tire of your food options and to ensure you're getting a healthy balance of protein, carbohydrates, fiber and fats.
3. Compile a list of foods and recipes that fits your preferences and calculate the total carbohydrates per servings using the Atkins calculation which is typically carbohydrate grams minus fiber grams. Refer to your Atkins book if you need further assistance in calculating total carbohydrate amounts.
4. Write your total carbohydrate amount on the top of a sheet of paper. Below that number, begin to write in the different foods you plan eat at each meal with the total carbohydrate amount. Conversely you can use sites such as Recipezaar.com to help compile recipes and create menu plans that calculate daily nutrition values for you.
5. Calculate the carbohydrate amount per day and ensure you are sticking to your plan. If you are over, determine how you can reduce your carbohydrates. You might be able to reduce portion sizes, swap ingredients in a recipe for more Atkins-friendly alternatives or even reduce beverages that have carbohydrates and replace it by drinking water.
6. Ensure you are getting enough to eat everyday by planning three meals and two snacks per day. Remember to also include low carbohydrate vegetables in your plan and take a multi-vitamin.

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Introduction to the Atkins Diet Plan

The Atkins Diet is a popular weight-loss method that involves eating protein and fat while excluding all bad carbohydrates and severely limiting good carbs. Of the Atkins Diet's four stages, the beginning "induction" is the most severely limiting but usually produces the fastest results.

Quick Start

• There are two reasons for using the first stage of the Atkins Diet to get started. The first is simply to see the fastest and most productive results. This is especially valuable for individuals with a lot of weight to lose. The second reason for the extremely concentrated first stage of the diet is to throw the body into ketosis. This switch makes the body burn stored fat for fuel. Under normal modern conditions, people eat large quantities of carbohydrates that the body uses as fuel. By eliminating most of those carbs the body is forced to consume the stored fat.

Calories

• Unlike most diets, calories play a much less significant role in the Atkins Diet. More important than limiting calories is making sure you eat enough calories to avoid making the body go into starvation mode. People often fear calories after a lifetime of being told to limit them. When starting a diet where meats are unlimited, people often are wary of the number of calories and try to limit them. Doing can cause a dieter to fall below the normal level of calories required by the body on a daily basis to perform normal functions. In that case, the body assumes it is starving and stops all fat consumption, thereby halting weight loss.

• Permitted Foods

• In the induction stage, dieters are allowed unlimited amounts of any meats including fish, poultry, beef and pork, along with eggs. Fats are unlimited as long as there is no sugar included in the ingredients. Dairy products often combine fat and carbohydrates, so they are severely limited. In the introduction phase of the Atkins Diet each dieter must eat 12 to 15 grams of carbohydrates per day but they are strictly limited to the acceptable carbohydrate group consisting of green vegetables, cheese, as well as oil and nuts. As dieters progress to the next levels, carbohydrates are gradually reintroduced. It is not true that the Atkins Diet completely eliminates carbohydrates from the diet in any stage, and the diet only severely limits them during the initial first few weeks.

Atkins Phases

• The first phase of the Atkins Diet, or induction phase, lasts for two weeks. Dieters then move on to the "ongoing weight loss" phase, or OWL. This second phase continues until dieters reach the last 10 pounds of their desired weight loss. At that point they switch to the "premaintenance" phase, and finally "lifetime maintenance."

Exercise and Water

• One area where the Atkins Diet is similar to all diets is that exercise and strict consumption of at least eight glasses of water per day are essential elements.

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