Once you know how readily you lose excess weight, you can plot your strategy on how to take it all off.
Now that you've enjoyed some success following the Atkins Nutritional Approach™, let's talk about sustaining that weight loss. You undoubtedly know exactly how much weight you lost during the first 14 days of Induction. That number will help give you a general understanding of your personal degree of metabolic resistance. As you can see on the metabolic resistance table below, a woman who has 40 pounds to lose and sheds three pounds in two weeks during Induction has a high degree of metabolic resistance as compared to a woman with similar weight-loss goals who drops eight pounds.
Weight Loss During the First Two Weeks on a Fat-Burning Program for Patients at Three Levels of Obesity
Degree of Metabolic Resistance for Men
| Pounds Lost in First 14 Days | |||
| Pounds Lost in First 14 Days | |||
| Pounds to Lose | High | Average | Low |
| Less than 20 | 2 | 4 | 6 |
| 20-50 | 3 | 6 | 9 |
| More than 50 | 4 | 8 | 12 |
As you've undoubtedly guessed, the degree of resistance to weight loss that your body shows corresponds to your degree of difficulty in getting well into fat burning. By definition, resistance to weight loss is resistance to lipolysis (fat burning).
During Induction you were consuming about 20 grams of carbs per day. The carbohydrate level was extremely low to demonstrate that it's possible for virtually everybody to experience lipolysis—from the person who can lose weight quite easily on almost any program to the hardest case, the person who, until doing Atkins, thought that losing weight was almost impossible.
Almost all of you found that you were losing weight. Many of you, however, are now looking forward to liberalizing your menu. But before you automatically move from Induction to Ongoing Weight Loss, read Are You Ready to Move Beyond Induction?