The whole point of Atkins is to eat fresh vegetables, healthy meats, drink lots of water and take your vitamins. If you instead gorge on sugars, sweets and starches, you're going to gain weight. That's pretty much common sense. Somehow, Newsweek made it out that the low carb diet was responsible for these people deciding to eat junk food instead.
In addition, the article claims that "Atkins ... prohibits almost everything except meat, eggs and cheese" in induction. This cannot be further from the truth!! The Atkins induction plan EXPLICITLY instructs that people should include ample vegetables, water, vitamins, fish and other healthy foods ESPECIALLY at the induction phase. Someone who is gorging on bacon and pork rinds is in fact going AGAINST the quite clear instructions in the Atkins book. It is amazing that this could be published and claim to represent what any low carb diet is about.
Then you have one of the "case studies" of a person who failed on Atkins. Dennis Fish says "there's hardly any room for starchy and sugary goodies". First off, the whole point of eating healthily is to avoid sugary food. If he loves to eat things with sugar in them, it's no wonder he gained 7 pounds while doing so. Second, if all this guy was after was a sweet fix, why didn't he pick up one of the 20+ brands of sugar-free chocolates and candies, just like the rest of the sugar-free-eating world does?
It's an indication of how little research was done for this article when they claim "sorry, beer drinkers: in all of these [low carb diets] you're out of luck". Any low carb person out there can tell you that there are MANY low carb beers on the market, some of them quite tasty.
It might be time for the Newsweek health team to do more research. In their flawed article, they held up two people who ate incredibly UNHEALTHILY and claimed that this was the "low carb way". Nothing could be further from the truth.
Low Carb Beer Listing
Lisa Shea's Library of Low Carb Books
