Dr. Atkins created a tremendous amount of confusion with his high-protein diet plan.  In fact, he has led most of the people in this country down a path toward ill health.  He convinced people that carbohydrates make you fat and that high-protein diets are the key to instantaneous weight loss success.  This is simply not true.  Research has proven that high-protein diets are no more effective for weight loss than any other type of diet. The fact is that weight loss is simple math.  It is calorie expenditure versus calorie intake.  It does not matter what type of food/calories you put in your body.  Whether the food is protein, carbohydrate, or fat is irrelevant.  It only matters how many calories.  If the number of calories you expend in a day is greater than the number of calories that you consume, then you will loose weight.

  Not only are high-protein diets no more effective in helping people to lose weight but they're damaging to your health.  High-protein diets can lead to serious health problems such as kidney failure, osteoporosis, kidney stones, and even cancer.

In addition to causing health problems, high-protein diets will also typically leave you feeling low on energy.  When you restrict your body from the intake of carbohydrates, you're restricting your body from its favorite fuel source.  If you restrict your car from gasoline, how well does it run?  The same can be said of restricting your body from carbohydrate.  Without carbohydrate, your body is missing its key fuel source.  This will leave you feeling lethargic and weak.

Nutritionists agree that you should only consume 10 to 15% of your diet from protein.  Another way to figure this is .8 g of protein per kilogram of your body weight (you can figure your body weight in kilograms by simply dividing your weight in pounds by 2.2).  If you're engaging in active exercise, you can increase your protein intake to 1 g per kilogram of body weight.  Anything more than this is simply going to produce an increased workload on the liver and kidneys.

The next time you're considering eating only the meat out of a hamburger, stop and think again.  Your big concern when consuming food should not be the avoidance of carbohydrate (carbohydrate should comprise 60% to 70% of your diet; 45% to 55% if you're diabetic).  Your focus, instead should be on the amount of calories that you are consuming.  If you're going to eat a 1000 calorie burger, it would be better to simply cut the burger in half and consume the half in its entirety.  This is a preferable strategy over only consuming the meat. 

No one particular food will make you fat.  Weight gain and weight loss is simple math.  If you consume too much energy (calories), compared to the amount of energy that you expend, you will gain weight.  It doesn't matter if the energy comes from carbohydrate, protein, or fat.  By the same token, if you expend more energy than you intake, and you will loose weight.  Even if your diet consists of 100% fat, you will not deposit any extra fat on your body as long as you eat fewer total calories than you burn during the day.

Stop the protein insanity today.  It is bad for your health.