"Seeing magazines filled with stories of starlets shedding pounds by gorging on meat, Lewis decided last fall to give Atkins a try"

Hello, since when is gorging on meat Atkins? Methinks Ms Lewis equalled low-carb with no carb and may not have read the book.

I hate lies in print. Did she "gorge" any salad or fruit while she was at it?

It's hard to say what the problem is if we don't see a food journal.

If you are tired, there are multiple reasons why.
1) You could simply not be eating enough to properly fuel the body. This is easy to do early on the ketogenic diet, since your appetite is effectively crush. This non-eating will result in faster weight loss, but you will also feel like crap and likely lose significant amounts of muscle in addition to the fat (trust me I know). If you suspect this is the problem, then eat more high-fat foods to pump up calories. Think nuts, avocado, fatty cuts of meat, etc.

2) Your body might not have yet made the switch over to a fat burning metabolism. If you are eating adequate levels of fat to sustain high energy levels, you might be tired because it is very early on in the diet. If this is the case, it is normal to feel this way early on. Your insulin levels are coming down, your body is adapting to a fat-based metabolism. If you are someone with significant sugar problems, your body probably isn't used to burning fat and can't do it effectively yet. It will take longer for you to adapt.

3) If it has been longer than two weeks, and if you are eating enough fat, perhaps you should investigate an alternate source of your lethargy. It might be a simple vitamin deficiency causing low energy. Make sure you take supplements... when you do low carb you are no longer taking in all the fortified refined food products you eat on a normal diet, so it's really easy to become deficient in vitamins. It's ironic that eating less processed food could increase chances of vitamin deficiency, but it's true. People on normal refined food diets are essentially eating vitamins every day. We are not eating the fortified foods so we need to take a multi.

In an ideal world we could eat enough nutritious food to not need a vitamin at all, but this isn't an ideal world. Because of our modern animal raising and agricultural practices, our foods - per calorie - contain less nutrition than they traditionally should. Additionally, because of our sedentary lifestyles, we burn far less calories than traditional humans would have. The combination of this (lower quality food combined with lower intake levels) results in modernized humans not consuming nearly as many health-promoting nutritional factors as we should. With the exception of young men and very active individuals, most people can't even consume enough to meet even the minimum RDA of many vitamins and minerals. For me this is very true. My pitiful metabolism isn't more than 1600-1700 calories. Even if I eat nothing but the best foods, I still find that I wind up deficient in something.

So, a multivitamin is non-negotiable. Make sure you take one.

4) If you have controlled the above factors... have you considered disease as a potential culprit for your lethargy? This is a sign of early diabetes. I know there is a lady on a diabetic newsgroup who claims that after 3 years of solid low carbing she suddenly started gaining weight, feeling lethargic, and very hungry. Because she is already diabetic, she knew that these symptoms were caused by increasing insulin resistance (despite keeping her carbs low). Cutting carbs & calories further did not help. She started insulin-sensitizing medication, and her symptoms cleared up. I don't mean to scare you... but if you still don't have energy on low carb after 1 2 and 3 are controlled for you might want to investigate disease as a cause.

Please note, if you feel more energetic on higher carb, it is unlikely this is your problem. However, if you feel very crappy on high carb, but "less crappy" on low carb... this could be the issue.

Thank you Its The Woooo!!! :thup:

You just helped me to understand what I've been doing wrong and what I need to do to fix my lethargy!! :agree:

Thank you too, I been fighting serious lethargy over the last 2 weeks. Even wrote about it here on the boards looking for suggestions.

I like how the big cereal companies are the ones pointing out that LC is on the way out :lol:

The only LC product I buy on a regular basis is the Carb Options Sweet Tomato salad dressing, and I mix it with other stuff so I only buy it once every couple of months. I also buy their BBQ sauce and Heinz sf ketchup -- that's it. I use them all sparingly (well, except a bit of ketchup with my eggs in the morning...).

Like they say, the products sell better in the first quarter (read Jan to March). Hmmm, that's when everybody's got their New Year's Resolutions, right? I'm sure WW, Jenny Craig, etc., as well as gyms and sellers of athletic equipment say the same thing :)