I used the fourth week of the Atkins diet as a way to transition between Phase One, Induction, and Phase Two, OWL. I had started changing up the way I had been eating for the past three weeks just a little bit. This, of course, provided a challenge.
Originally, my plan was to stay in the Induction Phase until I lost about half of the weight that I intended to lose. After having an unexpected allergic reaction to lettuce in the third week of the Atkins diet, I decided it would be a good idea to move on to the second phase of the diet. My concern was that if I was only eating one kind of lettuce, iceberg, that I would get incredibly tired of the food. OWL gives you a bit more food choices to work with.
In short, I learned this week that is it sometimes a good idea to deviate from your original plan about how you thought your diet would go. Everyone is different, and everyone’s body (and health issues), are unique to them.
My opinion is that you should work the diet around your own medical conditions, health issues, and food allergies, instead of attempting to fit your unique needs into the parameters of the diet. The infamous lettuce incident has taught me that making sweeping changes in how I eat, without consulting a doctor, is dangerous for me.
At some point in this week, I decided to try some gluten-free chocolate chip cookies that I’d had my eye on. Up until this point, I’d been really good about avoiding cookies, and breads, and (most) crackers. Ok, I’m not going to lie. The reason this was easy for me was because I learned that I had a gluten allergy, and couldn’t eat those kinds of food without getting sick. This makes it easy to avoid them!
This week, I learned that the best way to avoid the temptation of eating foods that have a whole lot of carbs in them is to make sure that you don’t bring them home from the grocery store. Once those gluten-free cookies were baked, and I could smell them, it was all over. I went way over my carb limit several days this week. This could have been easily avoided if I didn’t bring home those delicious chocolate chip cookies in the first place.
Despite these setbacks, I still managed to lose some weight. I didn’t strictly follow the Atkins diet. I never actually started exercising. I ate cookies. At the end of week three, I weighed 173 pounds. Although I did not expect the scale to tell me that I had lost any weight during week four, I ended up being surprised. At the end of the week, I weighed 172 pounds. My grand total of weight lost since I started the Atkins diet is now eight pounds, somehow.
Image by Lara604 on Flickr