Eric C. Westman - The New Atkins for a New You: The Ultimate Diet for Shedding Weight and Feeling Great

The ULTIMATE DIET for SHEDDING WEIGHT
and FEELING GREAT

Dr. Eric C. Westman,

Dr. Stephen D. Phinney,

and Dr. Jeff S. Volek

Copyright 2010 by Atkins Nutritionals, Inc.

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First Fireside trade paperback edition March 2010

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Phinney, Stephen D.

The new Atkins for a new you : the ultimate diet for shedding weight and feeling great forever / by Stephen D. Phinney, Jeff S. Volek, and Eric C. Westman.

p. cm.

A Fireside Book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Reducing diets. 2. Low-carbohydrate dietRecipes. I. Volek, Jeff. II. Westman, Eric C. III. Title.

RM222.2.P4952 2010

612.25dc22 2010002849

ISBN 9781-43919027-2
ISBN 9781-43919028-9 (ebook)

John Stuart Mill

When does a treatment once considered alternative become mainstream? Is it when thousands of overweight people shrink themselves and improve their diabetes control with a low-carbohydrate way of eating? Does it require years of an obesity epidemic in the setting of a lifestyle increasingly reliant on high-carbohydrate and processed foods? Possibly, but for physicians deciding whether to recommend a low-carbohydrate diet instead of a low-fat diet to their patients, it comes down to one thing: science.

Books, newspaper articles, and Web sites are wonderful ways to share new information; however, the ultimate way to change minds on a large scale is to do research. When study after study shows the same startling proof, physicians start to realize that what they previously regarded as unjustified is now scientifically verified.

In my work as a pediatric neurologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital caring for children with uncontrolled seizures, I have had the pleasure of witnessing a similar revolution in thinking over the past fifteen years. The ketogenic diet, similar to a low-carbohydrate diet, was created in 1921 as a treatment for epilepsy. Before the 1990s, even at major teaching hospitals in the United States, this dietary approach was often discarded as voodoo, unpalatable, and less effective than medications. Today, it is a widely used and universally accepted treatment worldwide. Skepticism is now rare, and almost all doctors acknowledge the effectiveness of the ketogenic diet. How did the perception of this treatment undergo such a radical change in just a decade and a half? Was it lectures at national meetings, parent support groups, or television coverage? They all certainly helped, but again, and even more important, research and hard scientific proof transformed disbelievers into advocates.

In The New Atkins for a New You, you will discover how in the same time frame science has similarly transformed the Atkins Diet from what was once considered a fad into an established, medically validated, safe, and effective treatment. This book also offers a wealth of new advice and insights into doing the Atkins Diet correctly, including numerous simplifications, making it easier for people everywhere to achieve the benefits of a low-carbohydrate lifestyle than ever before. As you will soon see, the volume you hold in your hands is far more than a typical diet how-to book. Not only have Dr. Eric C. Westman, Dr. Jeff S. Volek, and Dr. Stephen D. Phinney summarized the hundreds of research studies published in top medical journals, they have also authored many of them. In more than 150 articles, these three international experts on the use of low-carbohydrate diets to combat obesity, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes have led the way in repeatedly proving how a low-carbohydrate approach is superior to a low-fat one.

As a member of the Atkins Science Advisory Board, I have admired the work of these three clinician-scientists. It has been helpful to be able to call on each of them for their willing advice, and in a way now you can too, through this book. Their commonsense approach to starting and maintaining a low-carbohydrate diet is evident throughout the book, and their vast knowledge is especially evident in , A Diet for Life: The Science of Good Health. I know that I will often refer my patients to this section.

I find it sad that Dr. Robert C. Atkins did not live to see his diet so strongly validated both in scientific research and in this new book, which so heavily bases its recommendations on that research. Many of his ideas, personal observations based on thousands of patients, and philosophy, which appear in Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution and his other books, have been validated in this book, with science to back them up. When the first edition of Diet Revolution was published in 1972, the low-carbohydrate concept was not one that physicians embraced, nor did they think that it would prevail. In Dr. Atkinss lifetime, his dietary approach was subject to skepticism and disbelief by much of the nutritional community. Perhaps there is no greater tribute to his memory than that this is typically no longer the case today.