The Skinny
Average Weight Loss: Up to 10 pounds the first week, and two to four pounds a week as the diet continues.
Type of Diet: High Protein, low carbohydrate. This is not a vegan- or vegetarian-friendly diet.
This diet may be unsafe for certain individuals.*
About The Diet
As with most low-carb diets, exercise is optional. Initial weight loss can be significant, but largely consists of water weight loss and from depleting your body’s store of glycogen.
If you love meat, and can live without certain fruits, grains, and pasta for a while, this is an alternative to Atkins that you can try.
This diet has lots of rules to follow, but most diets do — the difference is that on low-carb diets having even one really “bad” day could result in gaining back water weight overnight which can be discouraging. The upside is that low-carb diets can be filling, and this one allows you to eat until you are satisfied — but only pure proteins.
The diet has four phases to follow:
- Attack Phase – In the first phase, you can drop a lot of weight (again, mostly water) as you eat all the pure protein you want.
- Cruise Phase – In this phase you are allowed to eat (some) vegetables, but only on certain days.
- Consolidation Phase – In this phase you get cheese and some bread, but again, there are rules about how you can eat these foods.
- Permanent Stabilization – In this final phase you can eat anything you want — as long as you follow a few rules. This phase is intended to maintain your weight loss.
The problem is that if you are not careful in that final phase you can quickly regain the weight you lost. This is true with any diet once you go off the weight loss part of the plan, but is particularly true with low carb diets if you go back to eating carbs without a care.
Be sure to look closely at the maintenance program, because losing weight on this diet will probably offer you good results quickly, but you need to be able to live with the plan for the long-term as well.
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- The Dukan Diet A French diet that has helped many A-list celebrities lose weight.
- Good for short term weight loss
** Provided for information only. This is not an ad but an excerpt from Amazon.com so you can read more about this book. **
The Dukan Diet: 2 Steps to Lose the Weight, 2 Steps to Keep It Off Forever
By Pierre Dukan
Devised by Dr. Pierre Dukan, a French medical doctor who has spent his career helping people to lose weight, the Dukan Diet rejects counting calories and promises permanent weight loss while allowing adherents to eat as much as they like.
Originally published in 2000, the Dukan Diet swept across France, championed by people who successfully lost weight following its unique four phase regime. The Dukan Diet has helped millions in France, where it has been number one for more than ten years and adopted in twenty countries, including the United Kingdom, Poland, Korea and Brazil. All together, The Dukan Diet has sold more than 3 million copies worldwide.
* Health Concerns
Low carb diets can be dehydrating and cause you to enter into a state of ketosis if you eat fewer than 40 grams of carbohydrates per day (some people may need to eat fewer than 20 grams per day to enter into dietary ketosis.) If you are diabetic, it will be hard to tell whether urine ketones are from your low-carb diet, or from ketoacidosis (a potentially life-threatening condition.)
There is still tremendous controversy surrounding low-carb diets, particularly if they are safe for people with kidney problems. Before starting any extreme diet plan the severely restricts any food group talk with your doctor or a registered dietitian. Most people can safely follow a low-carb diet, but because they do limit certain healthy fruits and vegetables and grains, you may not get all the nutrients your body needs without some careful planning.
One additional consideration for people with diabetes, or who are on medications to lower blood sugar or who suffer from hypoglycemia is that one dose of fast sugars to treat hypoglycemia will ruin your diet for the entire day.
