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.
REVIEW TYPE