There is a lot of flexibility in the foods that a person can eat while doing the Atkins diet. Many people will adjust things slightly, to avoid foods that are not their favorites. I happen to be a person who has a lot of food allergies. If I was going to do the Atkins diet, I would need to find a way to work it around my allergies.
I think the simplest way to do the Atkins diet is to take a look at the two week meal plan that is on their website, and follow it to the letter. This is one way to be absolutely certain that you are only eating foods that are allowed for the Phase that you are currently in. You reduce your chances of making mistakes, and unintentionally cheating on your diet.
I happen to be a person who has a ton of food allergies. I’ve been this way my entire life, and it has taken years in order to learn what I can safely eat without giving myself an allergic reaction. This requires constant vigilance, and even then, mistakes sometimes are made.
To be able to try the Atkins diet, I had to modify things around my allergies. I already knew what foods I was allergic to. So, the next step was to take the meal plan, and read over each and every recipe very closely. If it had too many ingredients that I couldn’t safely eat, I removed this recipe from my potential choices.
For other recipes, I pulled out the ingredient I couldn’t have and replaced it with one I could eat. Or, I just took it out and didn’t add anything back into it. It was very helpful to write down the meals or snacks that wouldn’t make me sick onto a sheet of notebook paper. This saved me the time of sorting through the meal plans, over and over again, every time I needed to try and find something to eat.
The original meal plans have one recipe or snack suggestion appearing only one time in a given week. My modifications resulted in me eating certain things several times a week. To keep this from getting boring I worked on making variations. I wouldn’t eat the exact same meal more than once in the same day. I would have something with eggs for breakfast, chicken for lunch, and maybe tuna for dinner. This allowed me to continue the Atkins diet beyond the first day.
Image by Andrew Fogg on Flickr