The short name for the Atkins nutritional approach is the Atkins diet. It's a low-carb diet created by Robert Atkins. He had gained a great deal of weight while he attended medical school. He read about this diet in the medical journal. He perfected it and released it to the public.

Dr. Atkins had rather radical theories about the nature of weight gain as expressed in the Atkins diet. He disagreed that saturated fats were the problem. Carbohydrates, found in potatoes, and breads, were the real problem. Atkins held that our obsession with fat actually worsened the problem. Many low-fat foods are packed with carbohydrates. Dieters were being tricked into eating foods that would cause them to gain more weight.

This all changes in the Atkins diet. He shifts dieters' metabolism to burn body fats by cutting out carbohydrates from their diets. That's the goal of weight loss. It's not just a matter of eating less. The diet would work because it burned calories. In fact Atkins cited a study that claimed the body would burn an extra 950 calories on his diet. That sounded good but it wasn't true.

Dr. Atkins also touted the positive influence this Atkins diet could have on people with type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is most often associated with obesity. So in general any diet that helps decrease weight will help address type 2 diabetes. Dr. Atkins also said that his Atkins diet would remove the need for medications such as insulin, because it severely cut down on carbohydrates which Atkins claimed were the major cause of type 2 diabetes. The jury is still out in the medical world as to the causes of type 2 diabetes. So while science agrees with Atkins that lowering intake of Carbohydrates will help with the disease, it would disagree that the step alone would remove the necessity for medicine.

What steps does one take to follow the Atkins diet? It follows four phases - induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance. Here are more details of Induction which is the most crucial of the phases.

As the first phase, Induction is the most crucial and most restrictive portion of the Atkins diet. It lasts for about two weeks. Carbohydrates are nearly removed entirely from the diet, only 15-20 grams can be consumed each day. The lack of carbohydrates will prompt the body to convert fat into fatty acids for fuel - a process known as ketosis. During this phase weight loss can reach as much as 10 pounds per week.

Learning the ideal carbohydrate levels for weight losing and for day to day intake after the weight loss ends are the purposes of the final three phases in the Atkins diet. Dr. Atkins himself died of complications of increased fat intake in his diet, which is something to keep in mind when choosing this diet.