What can I eat? This was my first question as I started the Atkins diet. I knew that the diet required me to stay under a certain amount of carbs, but I didn’t know how much. What foods should I be eating? I was going to have to learn how to eat, what to eat, and how to make it all work for me.
I suspected that I should start with the first phase of the Atkins diet, which is called Induction. I wasn’t entirely certain, though. To find out, I used the BMI calculator that is on the Atkins website.
I am five feet and three inches tall. I knew that I weighed 180.5 pounds as I was starting the Atkins diet. I quickly learned that this BMI chart does not allow you to enter in half pounds. The calculator assumed I typed in 1,805 pounds, instead. After freaking out for a second or two when the calculator told me I was in the “morbidly obese” category, I quickly realized my mathematical mistake.
When correctly used, the BMI chart tells me that I am in the “overweight” category because my BMI is 31.88. It also tells me that I should weight between 120 and 135 pounds. There is a box to enter my “goal weight” into. Based on the BMI information, and the fact that I am built rather sturdy, I selected 145 pounds. The calculator suggested that I start with Phase 1 of the Atkins diet. This means I must stay under 20 carbs each day.
The next thing I needed to do was figure out what, exactly, I could eat. One way to do this is to look in the Atkins book, in the chapter about Induction. I found a list of “acceptable foods” (and drinks). None of them had the carb count next to them, but I could find out how many carbs each food had by looking at the chart in the front of the book.
Technically speaking, a person could craft their own recipes by mixing and matching these foods, and keeping track of how many carbs the total was. As for me, my mathematical skills are virtually nonexistent, and I am not someone who really knows how to cook.
There is a much easier way to find out what to eat. The Atkins website has a two week meal plan that you can use. You could literally purchase all the ingredients that appear in this meal plan, and serve them exactly as the accompanying recipes describe. You wouldn’t have to put much thought at all into figuring out what to eat. I chose to loosely follow this meal plan because I needed to adapt it around my food allergies.
So far, the biggest surprise was that I was not allowed to eat any fruit while I was in Phase 1. I’ve always thought of fruit as healthy, but never considered the amount of carbs it had. I also learned that I pretty much had to give up drinking soda, which I think could pose a problem for me.
Image by Dana Robinson on Flickr