A person who truly applies the Atkins Food Guide Pyramid will notice something interesting: any hunger pangs they used to experience will seem to fade away. In fact, the combination of foods and ingredients suggested by the Atkins pyramid have powerful appetite suppressing effects. Here's why:
For starters, all proteins tend to satiate hunger. When they are consumed with a small amount of healthy fats (such as egg yolks, the soy fats found in tofu or organic animal fats), they can satiate hunger for hours!
When combined with cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and cauliflower, this appetite suppressing effect is amplified even further. These vegetables have a very high "bulk factor," meaning they make your stomach feel physically full. This actually signals your appetite control mechanism to settle down, since the body thinks that a full stomach is probably full of useful, calorie-rich food, regardless of what's actually in it. (You can fill your stomach with water and psyllium husk fiber and it will turn off your hunger for a while, too.) Cruciferous vegetables accomplish this nicely by providing fibrous bulk mixed with slow-digesting carbohydrates that provide a slow trickle of caloric energy over the next few hours.
If a person eats fruits or carbohydrates after getting their fill of proteins and vegetables, they get an even more powerful appetite suppressing effect. The natural sugars found in fruits won't spike blood sugar levels when those fruits are mixed with proteins, fats and vegetable fibers in the stomach. In this way, a low-carb dieter can effectively slash the glycemic index of fruits and carbs by loading their stomachs with slow-digesting foods first. That's why I always consume fruits on a nearly-full stomach. That way, they are digested slowly, right along with all the other high-fiber foods already taking up space in the stomach.
For these reasons (and several others that space doesn't allow me to explore), the Atkins Food Guide Pyramid is also a craving control pyramid that, if followed, will result in powerful appetite suppressing effects. That's good news for most Atkins dieters, since it is precisely the carbohydrate cravings that tend to drive us all crazy, right? If we can suppress the carbohydrate cravings in the first place, we can more closely follow the Atkins diet and experience lasting success from it.
What I'm excited about right here is that the Atkins Food Guide Pyramid doubles as a map for suppressing carbohydrate cravings! Eat from the bottom up (proteins first, vegetables second, fruits third, etc.) and you'll probably feel full by the time you get to the carbs anyway.
Do you see how there's much more to the Atkins pyramid than meets the eye? It is truly a marvel of nutritional wisdom, and its apparent simplicity can only be the result of intelligent, thoughtful design that greatly surpasses anything the USDA has produced (or will ever, most likely).
This article is reprinted from Analysis: The Atkins Lifestyle Food Guide Pyramid, a public education ebook provided free of charge by the non-profit Consumer Wellness Research Center.
Next: Part 6: Health Improvements
About the author: Mike Adams is an award-winning journalist and holistic nutritionist with a strong interest in personal health, the environment and the power of nature to help us all heal He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, and he has authored and published several downloadable personal preparedness courses including a downloadable course focused on safety and self defense. Adams is an independent journalist with strong ethics who does not get paid to write articles about any product or company. In mid 2010, Adams produced TV.NaturalNews.com, a natural health video sharing website offering user-generated videos on nutrition, green living, fitness and more. He also launched an online retailer of environmentally-friendly products (BetterLifeGoods.com) and uses a portion of its profits to help fund non-profit endeavors. He's also a noted technology pioneer and founded a software company in 1993 that developed the HTML email newsletter software currently powering the NaturalNews subscriptions. Adams is currently the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit, and regularly pursues cycling, nature photography, Capoeira and Pilates. He's also author of numerous health books published by Truth Publishing and is the creator of several consumer-oriented grassroots campaigns, including the Spam. Don't Buy It! campaign, and the free downloadable Honest Food Guide. He also created the free reference sites HerbReference.com and HealingFoodReference.com. Adams believes in free speech, free access to nutritional supplements and the ending of corporate control over medicines, genes and seeds.
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