Ditch the scale! It is evil and will lie to you. Inches lost are really the best things to judge how well you are doing, weight-loss wise.

As for low-carb versus low-cal... if you keep following Atkins (or any other LC plan) to the letter, there is an almost 100% guarantee that you willl not seriously alter your metabolism. On low-cal 'plans', there is really no such guarantee because your percentages of fats, proteins, etc. can change so drastically from day to day. Also, consuming fewer-than nomal calories from more than a week or two WILL put you into starvation mode. You could also start burning muscle instead of fat. The muscle actually weighs more, so you could actually be becoming 'flabbier' as the pounds drop off. You are also more likely to have unstable blood-sugar if you eat this way.

It really is up to you, though... if you decide to go low-cal, please do not do the 'eat what I want as long as I stay low-cal' thing. That WILL make you absolutely miserable. I'd suggest joining WW or hiring a nutritionist if you want to go this route, because you really do have to be more careful with your metabolism. The Atkins advantage is that we do not have to deal so much with that aspect of WL. I think you CAN lose faster with low-cal, but there are so many other aspects of that sort of diet you have to take into careful consideration; IMHO, it hardly seems worth it.

Don't even THINK of dropping below 1500 calories a day, though, no matter what you do! At your current weight, this constitutes a starvation diet. Even the 'low-cal' pushers feel that most relatively healthy-weighted adult women should NEVER drop below about 1200 calories daily. Of course, many low-cal dieters aren't even keeping track of how many calories they are actually burning, and this sets them up for all kinds of trouble. Tis sad.