Atkins 20: Understanding the New Atkins Diet Phase 1

Confused About Atkins 20?
This Simple Atkins Guide Will Clears Up Your Misunderstandings!

I was over at Low Carb Friends yesterday afternoon, and one of the members was seriously upset. She had just learned that the ANA (Atkins Nutritionals, Inc.) has come out with a brand new set of Atkins diets.

They have now dropped the New Atkins for a New You approach, and instead, they are offering two different versions of the Atkins diet plan:

1. Atkins 20, which includes a modified Phase 1
2. Atkins 40, which is a more flexible, low-glycemic diet

The ANA is calling Atkins 20 the original Atkins diet. But it is not the original Atkins Diet. Atkins 20 is a spin-off from what most of the low-carb community know as Atkins 2002, or DANDR.

Since there are a lot of people over at Low Carb Friends who are very confused by this new diet that is being presented on the Atkins website, this post will clear up any misunderstandings about Atkins 20 that you might have.

For example:

Some people are under the impression that the new Phase 1 includes fruit, nuts, and whole grains. This is not true.

Atkins Induction is still the same Induction plan that you have come to love and depend on.

However, Atkins 20 does introduce a few clarifications, some limitations on fats, and the ANA has surprisingly rearranged the Carbohydrate Ladder in a different order than what Dr. Atkins did.

What is the Main Focus of Atkins Phase 1?

Phase 1 vegetables are set at 12 to 15 net grams,
even though Dr. Atkins didn't do it that way.

For comparison, I'm using the most popular version of the Atkins diet plan, published in 2002. Within the low-carb community, Atkins 2002 is considered to be the Atkins Bible. It's the plan recommended more often than any other.

If you are doing Atkins 72 or some other low-carb program, the similarities won't be exactly the same.

By 2002, Dr. Atkins had introduced the concept of net carbs, or effective carbs as it is sometimes called by Atkins Nutritionals. In that Atkins plan, net carbs referred to the carbohydrates that significantly impact blood sugar, rather than simply what's left over after you subtract fiber grams from the total carbohydrate count.

By 2002, the Atkins Diet had evolved into a low-glycemic diet, rather than low carb, so the net-carb, or effective-carb, terminology has remained the same.

Neither fiber nor sugar alcohols are counted on Atkins 20.

Another thing that is the same is the number of carbohydrates you are allowed to eat during the first two weeks of the diet. That is still 20-net carbs. And non-starchy vegetables continue to make up most of those carbohydrates.

Atkins 20 calls them foundation vegetables and cautions dieters that 12 to 15-net carbs per day will measure out to be several cups, depending on the type of vegetables or salad greens you choose to eat.

Dr. Atkins' original 2002 diet recommended only 2 cups of loosely packed salad and 1 cup of steamed vegetables. However, the ANA upped the vegetable content and lowered the amount of extras shortly after that version was published to make Phase 1 more nutrient dense.

Some dieters followed the new recommendation while others stuck faithfully to Dr. Atkins advice. The line in the sand seems to be whichever way works best for you.

The more insulin resistant you are, the lower in carbohydrates you'll have to go to improve insulin sensitivity.

Since vegetables are super low on the glycemic index and do not require excessive amounts of insulin to get those nutrients into your body cells, most people are able to eat lots of vegetables without it interfering with weight loss.

But that isn't true for everyone.

What About Dr. Atkins' Restrictions?

The restrictions that Dr. Atkins placed on certain foods are still there.

Hard cheeses are still allowed on Phase 1, but in limited quantities, about 3 to 4 ounces per day. Same goes for:

• heavy cream (3 tablespoons)
• avocado
• olives
• juice of one lemon or lime

The Carbohydrate Ladder as introduced in 2002 is also still applicable, although the order of the foods you are allowed to return to your diet have been rearranged.

Hard Cheeses are limited to 3 or 4 ounces daily

The purpose of these restrictions is to keep the diet low enough in carbohydrate content that most people can get easily into ketosis, but not so high that any unbalanced hormonal levels won't correct themselves during the first two weeks.

Daily limits and restrictions are the process Atkins uses to correct hormonal imbalances and bring your elevated basal insulin levels down. Lower insulin makes losing weight easier on a low-carb diet because you won't be as hungry as you would be on other plans.

It's also because cheese, avocado, and heavy cream are quite high in calories.

Atkins 20 Corrects Many Misunderstandings

Dr. Atkins never foresaw the direction the low-carb community would go in after his death. To him, his advice to not fear fat, or eat until you are completely satisfied, was logical.

Many people were walking into his office after having spent years on low-fat low-calorie diets, and he wanted them to know that they didn't have to eat that way anymore.

Eating beef was okay.

Dr. Atkins advice:
eat relatively lean beef, as found in nature.

A low-carb diet allows you to eat more normally. But normal is the key word here.

At the time that Dr. Atkins created his low-carb diet, luxury meats were relatively lean. You couldn't even buy prime rib in the grocery store. Choice was the fattiest cut you could find, and most meats being sold were much leaner than that.

Recipes in Dr. Atkins' books were often made with:

• London Broil
• Sirloin steaks
• Skirt steak
• ground round
• tough stewing chickens
• lean scallops
• baby veal
• ground turkey

While Dr. Atkins loved to add a pat of butter on top of his steak, munch on a few macadamia nuts throughout the afternoon, or feast on fresh strawberries with real whipped cream for dessert, the recipes in his books were made with a minimum of added fats.

He wasn't adding several tablespoons of coconut oil to his morning's coffee or eating cream cheese off a spoon to get his fat ratio up to some artificial level.

He believed in eating protein-to-fat ratios as found in nature.

Atkins 20, like a New Atkins for a New You, seeks to correct some of the misunderstandings about protein and added dietary fats that are so rampant within the low-carb community.

It also places a stronger focus on portion control.

If Carbs are Low, Why is Portion Control Important?

One of the largest differences between Atkins 2002 and Atkins 20 is portion control.

In 2002, there was no portion control given at all. That change came later on.

Previous recommendations by the ANA for protein foods was 6 to 8 ounces of meat, fish, or poultry per meal, but in Atkins 20, that has been lowered to 4 to 6 ounces.

The Atkins website doesn't reveal the reason behind the change, but most low-carb dieters snack on protein foods like tuna salad, deviled eggs, and pork rinds, so it makes a lot of sense to cut back on protein at meals.

It is not unheard of for low-carb dieters to whip up a 20-gram protein shake or chow down on several ounces of beef jerky or hard cheese for a snack.

Fats contain no carbohydrates, but they are calorie dense and will interfere with fat loss if you eat too much.

While lowering basal insulin levels will drastically reduce your appetite, if you are eating all of the fats your body can process in a day, there is no reason for your liver to pull fat from your fat stores because there won't be a calorie deficit.

Many people eat tons of deviled eggs when doing Atkins.
Portion control and keeping track of calories is
not seen as important.

Atkins 20 limits added fats to 1 tablespoon per serving, 2 to 4 times a day. Mayonnaise cannot contain added sugar, and neither can salad dressings.

Salad dressings are also limited to 2-net carbs per 2-tablespoon serving. That's 2 tablespoons of salad dressing per salad. If bottled dressings available in your area do not fit into that criteria, you'll have to make your own salad dressing.

Conditions for Staying at 20-Net Carbs

Although the ANA believes it is safe to stay at 20-net carbs until you are 15 pounds away from your target weight, there are certain conditions you have to meet to stay at that extreme carbohydrate level. Your blood:

• pressure
• chemistry
• fats
• glucose levels

must be:

• stable
• fall within normal limits
• or at least be improving

This means you have to go to your doctor, if you want to stay at 20-net carbs per day, and have your cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood glucose control closely monitored by a medical professional while you're eating at those extremely low levels.

You also have to:

• feel good
• experience a high level of energy
• have normal sleeping patterns, with no insomnia
• be free of mood swings or emotional issues

If you're going to stay at Induction level of carbs for any length of time, it's vital that your carbohydrate choices be extremely nutrient-dense. Otherwise, you can go into starvation mode even if your calories are high. 

If your blood work is not normal, or at least improving, and if you don't feel good, are tired, are experiencing insomnia, or you're having mood swings or emotional meltdowns:

Do not stay at 20 net carbs per day!

If, on the other hand, you do meet the conditions above and you're losing body fat or inches, you can stay at 20-net carbs for a good chunk of your weight loss phase.

However, that isn't how Dr. Atkins designed the diet.

Plus, the longer you stay at drastic levels of carbs, the more determined your body will be to put the weight back on when you try and return carbohydrates to your diet.

How the DANDR Carb Ladder Worked

The Atkins Carb Ladder has changed!

Atkins 20, like all the other Atkins diet plans before it, consists of 4 phases:

Atkins Phase 1 is what used to be known as Atkins Induction. It lasts for the first two weeks of the diet and is the most restrictive phase in the program.

Phase 2 used to be known as the Ongoing Weight Loss Phase. This is where you begin to add carbohydrates back into your diet very slowly.

Dr. Atkins recommended you do this in 5 to 8 carbohydrate increments, so you could keep a close watch on how foods and groups of foods affect you personally. Many people have food sensitivities they are unaware of, and the DANDR Carb Ladder helped to pinpoint those problematic foods.

In 2002, Dr. Atkins recommended adding carbohydrate foods back into your diet in the following order:

1. more vegetables
2. fresh cheeses like cottage cheese or ricotta
3. seeds and nuts
4. berries
5. wine and other low-carb spirits
6. legumes
7. other fruits
8. starchy vegetables like peas
9. whole grains

You were instructed to move up the ladder every week, adding 5 grams of carbohydrates per day, along with the new food group, but only if you were still losing fat.

If you maintained that week, you stayed where you were and allowed the body to readjust to the new foods and higher carbohydrate count. At the end of the week, you then reevaluated what was happening.

Since the whole idea on DANDR was to shed body fat, maintaining your current weight and inches for 6 weeks was considered a legitimate stall.

At that point, you lowered your carbohydrate grams by 5 per day, and then watched to see if weight loss started up again.

This method was how you discovered your own personal carbohydrate sensitivity number for weight loss. Once you found that number, you always ate below it.

New Atkins Diet Plan Rearranges the Carb Ladder

The new Atkins diet plan rearranges the order in which you return foods to your diet during the weight loss phase, Phase 2, and also adds a few clarifications that the older Atkins diet didn't have:

1. nuts and seeds
2. berries, cherries, and melon (but not watermelon)
3. whole milk yogurt and fresh cheese like cottage cheese and ricotta
4. legumes
5. tomato and V8 type vegetable juices; also other fruits (but not fruit juices or dried fruits)
6. higher-carb vegetables like winter squash, carrots, peas, beets, and turnips
7. whole grains

As you can see here, the order in which cottage cheese and nuts are introduced have not only been flipped around, but berries, cherries, and cantaloupe has been placed ahead of cottage cheese.

For those of us that grew up with Atkins 72, this is a major shake up to the plan. Back in the '70s, cottage cheese was the very first thing we returned to the diet, ahead of anything else, including vegetables.

As far as weight loss goes, I personally don't see this as a good move, but I'm guessing that adding foods in this way would allow the intestines to heal before adding additional dairy products if one were sensitive to wheat or gluten.

That's the only advantage I see to shaking up the order in this way. Especially, since a lot of people cannot handle fruit without it setting off their cravings for carbohydrates.

What You Need to Know About the Carbohydrate Ladder

According to Dr. Eades, nuts and cheese 
are two major reasons for weight-loss stalls.

Many people are sensitive to nuts and fruit.

Nuts stall a lot of people. They do me. But only because mixed nuts are my one-and-only trigger food. I can't stop eating them if they are in the house.

If you are sensitive to nuts or fruit, your weight loss efforts could come to a complete stop as soon as you return nuts or almond meal to your diet. At that point, you might think that your sensitivity to carbohydrates is lower than it is.

Try to avoid tying a carbohydrate number to a particular food group.

If you take a good look at the carbohydrate ladder, any of them, they were not set up that way.

There is no relationship between nuts (or even cottage cheese or extra vegetables in the old systems) and 25 grams of carbohydrates per day.

There is no relationship between strawberries and blueberries and 30 grams of carbohydrates per day.

The Atkins Diet is a self-experimentation diet.

If you think that a group of foods might be giving you trouble, it's okay to skip over a rung of the ladder and try something else.

The Carbohydrate Ladder is a recommendation.

It is not a rule.

In my own personal low-carb diet experiments, I personally have no trouble eating starchy vegetables like corn, peas, and frozen mixed vegetables, but I do have trouble eating beans.

I have no trouble eating cottage cheese, but I can't digest cantaloupe very well.

The main purpose of the Carbohydrate Ladder is to help you become more aware of what you're eating and to alert you to the fact that whole grains, which includes many low-carb products like low-carb tortillas and flatbreads, might be interfering with your ability to drop the weight. 

Wheat and other grains should be the last food group that you experiment with, due to their tendency to cause stalls. Wheat products, even low-carb ones, should not be the first or second food group you add back.

Most people cannot go near whole grains until they are approaching maintenance. 

You can check this out by listening to people talk about the symptoms they experience when they cheat on their diet. The bloating, gas, and tiredness isn't from eating too many carbs. It is much more likely to be wheat or gluten sensitivity.

Why Low Carb Folks Were Confused

What frightened a lot of people over at Low Carb Friends was the discussion of the carbohydrate ladder.

A person giving an Atkins 20 overview referred to what you can return to your diet during the pre-maintenance and maintenance phases without actually saying that's what they were talking about.

There are no grains or starchy vegetables on Atkins Phase 1, and no grains or starchy vegetables required to follow Atkins 20 at all.

Check out the new Atkins 20 for yourself.

Atkins still is, and always will be, a self-tweaked individualized weight-loss plan that gives you lots of freedom within your personal carbohydrate sensitivity for weight loss.

Atkins 40: My Next Post

To demonstrate that point, in my next post, I'm going to try to explain Atkins 40:

• what it is
• who that diet was designed for
• and who else might benefit from using that plan

Although, it is causing quite a stir within low-carb groups, I'm really excited to know that the ANA has seen a real need within the low-carb community and has finally widened their reach to accept those who need to eat higher carbs into the low-carb fold.

Atkins for Life tried to do that with people who had less than 20 pounds to lose, but there was a wide gap between Atkins Induction and Atkins for Life that wasn't being addressed.

Well, now it is . . .

* Here's a link to that Atkins 40 post, if you want  to check it out:

Atkins 40: New Flexible Atkins Diet  Plan