The first two weeks of the Atkins diet are called Phase One, or Induction. You must do a full two weeks in this Phase. After the two weeks are over, you get a choice. Do you want to stay in the Induction phase, or do you want to go on to Phase Two? I would need to make a decision.
After spending two weeks in the Induction phase, I was fairly confident that I had a good understanding of what it was, and how to do it. I’d lost five pounds in the first two weeks of the Atkins diet, which I considered to be a great success. I wasn’t bored, or unhappy with Phase 1, but I was starting to be a little bit curious about what Phase Two would be like.
Phase Two is called “OWL”, which stands for “ongoing weight loss”. There were parts of this Phase that looked interesting. People who are in Phase Two are allowed to have 25 carbs, instead of the 20 that are allotted to the people who are in Phase One. I wasn’t having any problems staying under the 20 carb limit so far, so I didn’t feel as though I needed 25 carbs per day. It would be nice to have the option, though.
You also get more choices about what kinds of foods you can eat when you move to Phase Two. It includes some fruits, many different kinds of nuts, some seeds, and some juice. Personally, I was starting to miss fruit.
On the other hand, there were also some potential disadvantages of switching from Induction to OWL. The first thing I noticed was that there weren’t any easy to follow meal plans for Phase Two. The Atkins website had a really helpful meal plan that was designed for people who were in the Induction Phase. If I switched over to OWL, I would be doing it without the use of a tool that I relied on when I started Induction. Was I ready for that?
There was another thing about OWL that made it somewhat less appealing for me. You will not be able to lose weight as quickly in OWL as you were able to in the Induction phase. If I switched, it would take longer for me to reach my goal weight. This news sounded somewhat discouraging.
In short, when you reach the end of the second week of the Induction phase, you must make a choice. Would you prefer to be able to eat more types of food? Or, would you like to continue to lose weight quickly? There isn’t an upward limitation about how many weeks you can stay in the Induction Phase, so I didn’t have to leave it right now if I didn’t want to do so.
After doing a lot of thinking, I decided that the best course of action for me was to do one more week of Induction, (for a total of three weeks within it). I will see how this week goes, and reassess when I get closer to the end of the week.
Image by Brisbane Falling on Flickr