Atkins Diet Menus

Now that you’ve decided to get on the Atkins diet, you would want to know what you’re options are and how you can make what you eat continue to remain interesting. Daunting as it may seem, you do get a hang of it over a period of time.

Planning

The first things you need to do ahead of the planning, is to allocate your carb intake in your meals appropriately. Breakfast can do with up to one third your total everyday carb intake, not more. Frequent ‘snackers’ should ideally allocate lesser than a third of the everyday carb intake per meal. Lunch often poses to be a challenge because keeping your carb intake here at less than a third of your everyday intake does make selection quite interesting. If dinner is your largest meal, it should have a full third of your everyday carb intake.

Protein based snacks are best, and in buying packed snacks, make sure you look out for ‘hidden’ sugar.

Breakfast

• Induction: Induction level breakfast menus shouldn’t have more than 6 grams of carbs. Eggs, ham, bacon, lox, and various cheeses are perfect.
• OWL: At this level the carb intake should not exceed one third the everyday intake. Apart from what you can have in the previous level, you can also add ‘low carb’ bread to the list.
• Maintenance: Breakfasts here are quite similar to the ones in the previous level. However, you can now have citrus fruits, berries, melon, and unsweetened yogurt as well.

Lunch

• Induction: While you can easily fit a salad in your lunch, eating your entire day’s quota of 3 cups here would leave you without any veggies at dinner. A relatively small salad coupled with a burger, or a meat salad, are good lunch ideas.
• OWL: Here, the freedom of making choices does make your lunch seem way more appealing.
• Maintenance: As long as your dinner does not have more than a third of your everyday carb intake, pretty much anything is ok.

Dinner

• Induction: This stage consists of simple meals that do not exceed the 7 gram carb limit. A little thinking out of the box can make for interesting dinners here. An example being, smoked salmon as appetizer, a Caesar salad without the croutons, some steak, some steamed/ baked broccoli, and sugar free gelatin.
• OWL: With the increase in your everyday carb allocation, you do have more of a choice here.
• Maintenance: Again, just like the lunch, almost everything is ok as long as it does not have more than a third of your everyday carb intake.

Of course, sugar, at all stages continues to remain a no.

Snacks

People at the induction level can choose from Vienna sausages, crust-less quiche slices, pork rind, beef jerky, hard boiled eggs, cheese, etc.

People at the OWL level can add cream cheese, lox, and deviled eggs to the previous list.

People at the maintenance level can up their carb intake to up to 5 grams. Snacks here can be varied as long as they’re sugar free and within the carb intake limit.