Sustainability of the Atkins Therapy: Combining Enjoying Good Food with Moderate Exercise

**(Almost) everything disappeared**

As we have mentioned before, one of the reasons people stick with Atkins therapy is that they don’t have to go hungry first and then wolf down their food, which is the most common complaint about calorie therapy.

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Once you enter the Atkins Lifelong Weight Management phase, there are very few foods you can truly avoid. Of course, junk food with no nutritional value, such as all kinds of candy and sugary soft drinks, is permanently prohibited; all other foods are allowed.

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You can even eat bread and pasta, but it's highly recommended that you eat whole-grain products. If you can limit the amount you eat, you can avoid weight gain. It's not particularly difficult to do this.

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In fact, once you've been on Atkins therapy for several months, your interest in high-sugar foods may have greatly decreased; you'll find snacks and other sugary foods too sweet, and you'll immediately crave coarsely processed whole-grain bread, breakfast oats, brown rice, sweet potatoes, and other similar foods.

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In short, the only way to maintain a diet and thus your target weight is to fully enjoy the foods you like, in enough quantities to keep you from feeling hungry.

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As you gradually add sugary foods to your diet, you'll learn to identify which ones cause blood sugar instability and hunger. By correctly following Atkins' approach, you'll enjoy enough of the foods you like and fully satisfy those past food cravings.

**Exercise: Not a secret weapon**

Some people will tell you that you can successfully live the Atkins method without exercising. They may not be entirely wrong. Exercise is an essential part of any healthy lifestyle and is crucial for permanent weight management.

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First, you should know that whether you exercise or not will have a decisive impact on your health.

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Regular physical activity-that is, exercising for one hour every day-can reduce the incidence of almost all of the most common and deadly diseases.

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Secondly, for those who want to lose or maintain their weight, exercise has remarkable effects: burning calories is well-known, but a lesser-known aspect of exercise is that it increases the ratio of lean muscle to fat.

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The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn at rest. So it's not just when you're working out hard that you burn calories; when your metabolism is at rest, fat burning also speeds up.

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James Gilberts, who lost 45 kilograms using the Atkins method, explained that the rate of weight loss really did increase when he took his regular walks around lunchtime.

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"This method not only helped me relieve stress, but also burned fat." He later discovered that changing his current exercise routine helped him break through a plateau in his weight loss: if he walked every day, his weight loss would stop, but if he switched to cycling, his weight would start to drop again.

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Now, he maintains his weight by consuming no more than 70 grams of sugar per day.

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Gillibos is right in that he understands the biggest benefit of accelerating your workout program is the potential to increase your ACE levels; in other words, you can eat more sugary foods every day without gaining weight!

You need to make sure you do two types of exercise every day. One is aerobic exercise, which is good for your heart and lungs and improves your endurance; the other is anaerobic exercise, which can strengthen your muscles. Aerobic exercises include walking, jogging, swimming, and cycling.

Anaerobic exercise is weight-bearing exercise, which includes a wide range of weightlifting exercises, such as lifting soup jugs at home. Both forms of exercise have long been considered essential for health and weight maintenance. "Addicted" to any activity like dance or tennis is also meaningful.

**Filling the food gap**

The agricultural products we eat today contain less nutrients than they did 50 years ago. Because our land has become infertile due to over-cultivation, vegetables and fruits transported from hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away lose a considerable amount of nutrients due to the long delay from the place of origin to your delivery truck, and finally, some nutrients are lost when cooking.

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Therefore, no matter what recipe you follow, the food in it will contain fewer nutrients than you expect. We Americans also have another problem with our diet: we consume too much junk food.

The Atkins approach to nutrition explains several reasons for supplementation. In the first phase of weight loss, it is extremely important to replenish nutrients that were lacking in your previous diet.

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According to the Standards of American Food (SAD), you may be deficient in nutrients, especially fiber. No matter how well you feel you're eating, environmental pollution, excessive soil depletion, and the daily stresses of modern life necessitate that you plan ahead and supplement your nutrition like you would buy insurance.

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However, even in the more relaxed phase after the first stage of weight loss, everyone is encouraged to supplement with a minimum amount of multivitamins and minerals daily.

**Call it a lifestyle**

When you open Atkins' book, you begin to prepare yourself for the Atkins lifestyle, or rather, for the rest of your life.

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If you soon hear others call the Atkins method a "diet," you should listen to your own inner voice: "This is not a diet, it's a lifestyle."

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If you are obese, the Atkins method can help you lose weight, improve fat structure and blood pressure, increase your energy, and reduce your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases.

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It can relieve many symptoms caused by unstable blood sugar (low blood sugar). It can also help you correct picky eating habits and discover which foods you are allergic to.

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The Atkins Method is a approach to a healthier, more balanced diet and lifestyle. First, congratulations on your newfound knowledge! In the following chapters, we explore the complexities of sugar and tell you which foods are nutrient-rich, which have little impact on your blood sugar, and which you should avoid.