Diet advice based on real world personal experience!

“The Atkins Diet Just Didn’t Work For Me & Unfortunately, 

It Likely Won’t Work for You Either!”

My Atkins Diet Experience

What you’ll find in this open letter is information that will help you better understand the Atkins Diet approach to losing weight and my experience with it. I wish I had this information before I spent my hard earned money on the Atkins Diet.  It's my hope that you will find my experiences and my recommendation to be of great value as you evaluate your weight loss options.    

Hi there.

My name is Jessica Seymour. 

At the time I'm writing this, I'm 38 years young and have a fantastic family of 5 including Craig my handsome hubby, and our 3 boys - Conner, Alexander, and Trent.  That's us below in a recent picture.

I've been pretty active and physically fit for most of my life and didn't really have weight issues until I gave birth to our first son Trent just over 5 years ago. A year after giving birth to Trent, I still weighed 173 pounds and I was so embarrassed about how much I weighed that I knew I had to do something about it. 

The extra weight made my sleep fitful, my ankles would swell up, and I would get headaches daily. Unfortunately though, my body had so many aches and pains that I couldn’t find the energy or will power to be more physically active, so I had to focus my efforts on diet. 

The first diet I tried was the Atkins Diet.  I had heard a lot of mixed reviews about it over the years but decided to give it a shot anyway just based on the fact that what stuck in my mind was how some of my co-workers had dropped weight pretty quickly with it in the past.  You can read all about my Atkins experience further down this page.

My next choice (because they make the food look so good in their ads) was to try the Medifast Meal Plan program but I should have known it wouldn't be that easy.  My Medifast experience proved to be a short lived, eye opening experiment I’ll just call; “Can Guess what meal you’re drinking now?” Read about it here. 

I then joined LA Weight Loss, but that turned out to be a huge mistake for a number of reasons which you can read all about here. 

About six months after my LA Weight Loss fiasco, I decided to give dieting another shot with The Zone Diet program at the urging of a good friend whose father had seen good results with it. Learn more about my unsuccessful Zone Diet experience here. 

The good news is that at the time of writing letter, I weigh in at a healthy and happy 128 pounds, I've lost what was a significant belly and most of my butt and have maintained this weight within a couple of pounds for over two years now. 

This despite my lack of success with Atkins, Medifast, LA Weight Loss and The Zone Diet. 

My secret weapon is a comprehensive weight loss program that uses “ Calorie Shifting”, to deliver results; But... before we get to what is working for me, please take a few minutes to read about my experience with the Atkins Diet below. 

About the Atkins Diet… 

Created by Dr. Atkins in 1972, the Atkins diet is a low-carb diet plan that strictly limits carb intake while allowing users to eat  liberal portions of protein-based foods such as meats, fish, shellfish, fowl, eggs and soft or semi-soft cheese. 

The theory is that when you reduce the intake of carbohydrates your body will enter a phase called ketosis and during ketosis your body burns the fat already stored in your body when it needs fuel instead of using the foods in your diet.  This in turn stops insulin production, which prevents more fat being stored by your body. 

There are four main stages to the Atkins diet: 

Stage one – induction: 

The induction stage covers the first two weeks; during this time people have reported weightloss of 15 pounds or more, simply because you will reduce your carbohydrate intake to 20 grams per day. The only carbs you can eat are low-carb vegetables, and even then you are limited to how many you can eat. 

Stage two – ongoing weight loss (OWL Phase): 

During this stage you can increase your carb intake to 25 grams per day. 

Stage three – pre-maintenance: 

When you reach the pre-maintenance stage you can try other foods to see what carbohydrates you can add to your diet. 

Stage four – maintenance: 

After you have reached your weightloss goal you can eat all good carbohydrates; but the premise behind the diet plan is that you won’t want to eat them. Choosing to eat healthy carbs will become a way of life for you. 

The Atkins Diet has grown into a huge franchise, promoting books, supplements and other related products and it is still one of the most popular and successful low- or no-carb diets out there. 

This diet continues to be appealing to many consumers, while also being a source of much controversy in the diet and medical communities. 

My experience with the Atkins Diet… 

The Atkins Diet was one of the first real diet plans that I ever really attempted.  Honestly, I struggled through the Induction phase of Atkins, lowering my carb intake until i went into ketosis (which i later learned is not healthy for the metabolism).  I found I was tired and craving carbs and starchy veggies all the time.  I also developed an incureable case of bad breath (which I didn't have previously), which had me carrying Altoids around all day and brushing my teeth at work. 

When I finally reached the Ongoing Weight Loss (OWL) phase of the Atkins diet, I felt pretty awful.  It was a relief to be able to add more carbs, some fruits and starchy vegetables to my  diet... but unfortunately, at this point my body and my diet went haywire.  I started gaining weight back despite the fact that the weight loss was supposed to continue.

My theory as  to why this occured is that I had lowered my metabolism so much during ketosis that even the slight caloric increase of Stage 2 caused my body to be desperate to store the new calories as fat.

My Results… 

Perhaps it's partly attributable to my dieting inexperience but all in all, my Atkins diet experience was awful, awful, awful.  The lack of carbs made me tired, weak and increased my food cravings.  I just had ZERO energy to go outdoors and do anything that required any real physical effort.  I'm sorry to admit it but I didn't last 4 weeks on this plan, and in fact, I ultimately gained 3 lbs before I called it quits. I know its probably from the decrease in the level of my physical ativity but it just couldn't be helped. 

3 Key Learning’s…

1) Make sure you have very strong will power and a determination to succeed. If you don't, you shouldn't waste your time with the Atkins Diet as this will be a short term fix at best.

2) Your food choices are extremely limited on this diet.  Make sure you have the budget to buy the tastiest vegetables, meats and cheeses to help you look past all of the other foods you're craving but can't eat.

3) Make sure you have a healthy appetite for red meat which is a staple of this diet... but don't expect to get a bun or fries with that burger, or mashed potato's with that steak.

IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE - Warnings you need to be aware of:

1) A diet rich in red meat may increases the risk of colon cancer. Therefore the Atkins Diet may not be a good choice for anyone with a family history of colon cancer.

2) The American Heart Association has come out publicly against the Atkins Diet suggesting that it may increase the risk of heart disease.

3) A recent study, carried out by scientists at Tufts University in Boston, looked at the impact of low-carb diets on the brain power of 19 women. 10 of the subjects were placed on the Atkins diet and 9 were placed on a conventional low calorie diet.  The results revealed that within a week, the ten women on the low-carbohydrate diet were far worse at mental tests than those on the conventional low-calorie diet.

• A big positive is that it works without you needing to radically change your lifestyle.
• It uses a unique but simple approach called Calorie Shifting which teaches you how and when to eat in order to turn your body into a fat burning furnace. 
• It's convenient because you eat real food, that tastes great and that you buy at your local grocery store for reasonable prices. 
• You won't be tempted to cheat because you eat 4-6 times per day, and NEVER feel hungry. 

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