How to Make it Through Atkins Induction Without Cheating

Tips and tricks to help you conquer your
first month on Atkins without cheating

For most people, a low-carb diet helps to control hunger by eliminating cravings and enabling you to reach satiety.

This aspect of the Atkins Nutritional Approach makes Atkins one of the best ways to lose weight, but that’s only after the body enters the state of ketosis and becomes ketone-adapted.

Up until then:

Cravings and hunger can cause you to mindlessly grab for the cookies and bread.

Generally, it takes about 3 days to see a dip in hunger. And sooner, if you drastically lower your carbs and ramp up your activity level.

However, those first three or four weeks are going to be rough, especially if you've been using comfort foods to help you handle stressful and emotional situations.

A low-carb diet isn't like a standard low-calorie diet, where cheating comes with a very small price. On low carb, the cost for cheating is quite high. It can actually stop you from entering into the state of Nutritional Ketosis.

It takes about three weeks before the brain becomes proficient in using ketones to fuel most of its needs and the body switches to using fatty acids instead of ketones and glucose.

To make this happen smoothly, you'll need to strictly follow the Atkins rules of Induction.

Since many individuals choose to stay with the Induction Diet for at least the first month, you are going to need the following tips and tricks to help make the adjustment easier to live with.

My Best Tip for Getting Through Induction Without Cheating

The state of Ketosis occurs when glycogen stores in the liver fall below a particular level. For most people, this is about half-empty.

While muscles also store glycogen, that glycogen is not accessible to the liver. Muscle glycogen is a self-contained system. Only the muscles can convert muscle glycogen to glucose and use that glucose for fuel.

At this point in the low-carb process, where glycogen becomes depleted, the body goes in search of more fuel.

At first, it ramps up the oxidation of protein, but as carbohydrate deprivation continues, it stops using protein, to preserve muscle mass, and begins to break down the triglycerides stored in your fat cells instead.

One of the by-products produced from breaking down fat is ketones.

Since the body often has difficulty creating fatty acids quick enough to fulfill your total energy needs, these fragments are dumped into the bloodstream along with glucose made from a process known as glyconeogenesis and are used for fuel by almost all body systems, organs, and tissues.

Burning ketones for energy will change as the body adapts to ketosis, but during the first week, the whole body burns ketones, glucose, and protein.

The brain cannot burn fatty acids, so it needs some glucose along with the ketones, about 120 carbs worth of glucose per day. This need for glucose is where the hunger and cravings come into play, once your liver glycogen starts to dwindle.

When glucose first runs low, due to your liver's glycogen stores being depleted, the body will start screaming for sugar. This cry can get quite violent, so to head it off ahead of time, you need to:

Load up on plenty of protein and fats during the first 3 to 5 days, while waiting to get into ketosis.

Don't think about calories or portion sizes. Just eat.

Assuming you’re coming to a low-carb diet with a liver completely full of glycogen, for the first 3 or 4 days, the amount of protein and fat you eat should be quite high.

In fact, in The Ketogenic Diet, written by Lyle McDonald, he clearly states that low-carb dieters need a minimum of 150 grams of protein per day for the first 3 weeks.

So never, ever, go hungry.

While listening to the voices in your head urging you to eat isn't normally a good idea, at this point in the weight-loss process, it doesn’t matter where the hunger urges are coming from – mind or stomach.

With glycogen low, you want to feed those urges with plenty of protein and fat! If you don't, you're more likely to cheat and reach for a donut or chocolate cookie instead.

After you enter the state of ketosis and your hunger and cravings go way down, once those urges become more manageable, there will be plenty of time to think about what those urges mean and what a normal portion size looks like.

But for the first 3 to 5 days, just eat.

The Goals of Atkins Induction

Let’s face it.

You have turned to a low-carb diet because you want to lose body fat. You want to reach a normal weight, or some image of the perfect body you're holding in your head, and you want to enjoy all of the blessings that go along with that goal.

There is no denying that, and I get it.

I honestly do.

But, the Atkins Induction Diet isn’t about that.

If you’re new to low carb, that might be a strange idea to you, but the main purpose of Phase 1 is to help your body shift into fat-burning mode, as well as adapt to the metabolic switch as quickly as possible.

Losing weight during that first month is a side effect.

Losing weight is not a given!

There are no guarantees.

The body will do all sorts of wacky stuff trying to adapt to carbohydrate and calorie deprivation.

So you need to get adequate protein, about 150 grams per day.
You need to have an adequate fat intake, even if that puts your calories a bit too high. And you need to only eat 20 carbs per day, or less.

Don't cheat!

Stick to the plan!

And above all, stay away from your weight-loss scale. Watching all of the water fluctuations that occur during the first month on Atkins will drive you nuts!

It's perfectly normal for your weight to bounce around a bit, so don't do that to yourself.

This is not a diet.

The Atkins Nutritional Approach is a radical lifestyle change, so what the scale is doing doesn't matter at this stage in the game. You are trying to set up a solid foundation that you can build on as you move into Atkins Phase 2.

The idea is to give your:

1. Insulin levels time to return to normal, if elevated.
2. Blood sugar level time to normalize.
3. Brain time to adapt to using ketones for most of its needs.

Once all of that happens, your other body systems will save the ketones for the brain and switch from using ketones to using fatty acids exclusively. That exclusive fat-burning process actually means more fatty acids are being turned into fuel and used. That's what you want.

So there is a lot happening during that first month.

Mentally, it’s going to be difficult.

Not just because your brain will be screaming for sugar, but also because a low-carb diet brings a dramatic shift in the types of foods you'll be eating for the rest of your life.

If you are overweight or obese, chances are your diet has been predominantly heavy on carbohydrates.

To make the diet easier, thoroughly study the list of allowable foods for Induction. Eat nothing that isn’t on that list, keep your meals simple, and give your body time to adjust before worrying about weight loss.

The scale is not an accurate measure of your progress on Induction.

Induction is not the Atkins Diet

The Atkins diet recommends that you eat
fresh berries and other low-glycemic fruits

Atkins Induction is an introduction to a low-carb diet.

It is designed to reduce cravings quickly, get you into the state of Nutritional Ketosis, and show you the benefits of eating low carb over a typical low-calorie diet.

But, it is not the Atkins Diet!

The Atkins Diet is a methodical approach that enables you to discover your personal carbohydrate tolerance level. This means that the Induction Diet is not meant to be used in any other way other than as the beginning of the low-carb path.

Atkins Induction is a temporary corrective measure.

It is not a weight-loss diet.

Now, it’s quite possible that you might discover your carbohydrate tolerance to be low, which means you might need to stay on 20 carbs per day for life, but this isn’t always true, so don't worry about that right now.

Just give yourself time to adjust to the changes in food.

There is nothing magical about 20 grams of carbohydrates per day. In fact, Atkins’ original diet only allowed about 5 to 10  carbohydrates per day.

The aim of the original Atkins Diet was to design a diet that would hit the target of ketosis for almost everyone.

Many people can easily get into ketosis and maintain ketosis at a carbohydrate level that is much higher than 20 grams of carbohydrates per day.

But books are always created for the masses.

The average person.

Personally, even with my current health issues, I can easily enter into ketosis at 60 grams. So don’t believe the 20-gram level is the only way to get into ketosis. That is definitely not true.

Give your body time to make the metabolic switch, and then – let go of Induction. Make it a thing of the past!