I'm hardly a diet guru but I see all kinds of red flags with your diet. Seven eggs? I would think one or two would be enough. Bacon and cheese are generally no-no's if trying to lose weight I would think? Hamburger probably should be replaced with fish or turkey and mayonnaise is straight fat.
I think nuts are a high fat food as well....or at least some of them? Some one can chime in on that. Don't get me wrong, I am hardly a perfect weight but I see some places you might want to consider some adjustments. Especially if you are trying to lose weight.
Contrary to popular indoctrination, fat doesn't make you fat. Restricting fat intake and calories does more damage than restricting carbs. Low fat/low calorie diets all wreck havoc with insulin and other hormones, and it's why Type II diabetes is at pandemic proportions in the US and around the world. The Food Pyramid was invented by the USDA, and for nearly 50 years the biggest part of that pyramid was grain-based - corn, breads, etc. A Food Pyramid promoting the very thing the USDA has a self-interest in. Go figure. Grains are what makes cows fat, BTW.
If you eat nothing but fat and protein you will lose weight, and a lot of it. The most potent fat storing hormone, insulin, triggers different enzymes and other hormones to regulate the storage of fat. When eating just fat, say, a meal consisting of 2 sticks of butter, maybe 10% of that gets used in the body and the rest is expelled as unneeded. But, if you eat lots of fat combined with carbs, it becomes a significant problem, because carbs trigger 3 other hormones that store fat, and those hormones along with insulin just go fat-storing crazy.
When you combine fat and carbohydrates together, two different energy sources, the insulin will take precedence over the other hormones to process the carbs, and the other hormones simply take the leftovers, the fat, and store it as fat. It's even more pronounced when the fat is animal fat, because insulin is required in order to process it, and the insulin is already busy handling the carbs. So, eating fat and carbs together, unless it's one of the healthy fats (olive and nut oils, mainly) is a really bad idea.
There are two issues that I see with Blizzard's version of Atkins. Well, three, actually. One is portion control. Two, he clearly hasn't read the book and doesn't know that nuts are definitely not part of Phase 1 and he doesn't know how to count the carbs or how many carbs per day he is allowed. Between the peppers, cheese and tomatoes, he's likely way over his daily allotment for Phase 1. Yes, cheese has lots of protein, but every slice or cube is 1 carb. The carbs need to be meticulously counted and written down. No exceptions. Three, the mistaken notion that you can eat all the protein (and fat) you want without eating the proper amount of vegetables. This means salads, lot and lots of salads. 2 or 3 cups a day (not per sitting) of salad vegetables. Not just lettuce wrapped around some meat or some bell peppers thrown into an omelet. It means salads as the main course with perhaps a little diced chicken or crumbled bacon on top. Processed meats, such as ham, bacon, pepperoni, salami, hot dogs and other luncheon meats should be eaten in moderation, not only because many of them are cured with added sugar, which must be counted in the carbs count, but also because they often have added salt and nitrates.
He also isn't eating the right foods to get the proper vitamins (vitamin supplements are supposed to be just that, supplements to the vitamins you get from food, they are not replacements for eating foods which contain little or no vitamins). Before you begin the Atkins Diet it's imperative that you read the book, all of it, from cover to cover, and
then start the diet. There are things in the middle and the end of the book that you need to know about when first starting the diet. Don't get it piecemeal off the Internet, read the book.
Another reason I know he hasn't read the book is, "so pick a day or two a month where you eat a few slices of pizza, but maintain a strict diet plan the rest of the time." Anyone who's read the book knows that's implicitly and expressly a no-no. Periodic "cheating" with carbs like pizza induces your body to become insulin resistant, and in order to counteract that induction, you have to go back to Day One of Atkins Induction and start all over as if you've never been on the diet at all. But you can only do that a few times before you body says fuggetaboutit. If you wanna "cheat" it
must be done with a natural, non-processed carb, like an orange. Certainly not pizza dough.
One of the keys to Atkins, and any diet high in fat, is eating copious amounts of fiber along with it. All the eggs and bacon in the world are meaningless (and can even be more damaging than the carbs) without fiber. Iceberg lettuce has even less nutritional value than flour, sugar and pasta, so eating a hunk of meat wrapped in an iceberg lettuce leaf doesn't give you anywhere near the proper amount of fiber or vitamins that is required for this diet. A low carb burger wrapped in Romain would be better. A 7-egg omelet is not watching portion control. 7 eggs in a day is fine, just not all at once in one sitting, especially when combined with peppers and half a slab of bacon.
The Atkins book highly stresses portion control. Eat often, 5-8 times a day, but in small portions only. Eating a large portion, even one of healthy eggs (yes, they are healthy for you, despite the rampant misinformation in the media about cholesterol), will cause the body's metabolism to slow down, which increases insulin resistance, which causes all that fat to be stored, which is the very thing Atkins is trying to reverse.
If you read the book you'll know the overall big picture of what Atkins is. It's not an all-you-can-eat meat-and-cheese baconpaloosa, it's all about eating the proper foods, natural nutrient dense foods, in the right proportions. Atkins starts out dramatically restricting carbs and portions to shock the body into once again properly processing the calories you are eating. Later you begin to add more carbs, but the right kind from the right sources. Eventually you add plenty of carbs back to your daily diet, but all the carbs are of the proper kind. By the time you get to Phase 3 and Phase 4, you will have learned how to eat properly, and why.
I do wish you luck with Atkins, Bliz. But please read the book. Actually, I recommend the book to anyone, whether they are interested i the diet or not. There's a ton of very good information in there about nutrition and eating right. It's not even The Atkins Diet, officially it's called The Atkins Nutritional Approach, and for good reason.
