hi again

mb99 - Yes, the reason i still stay around induction levels is because i wanted the weight to come off as fast as possible. I would prefer to "learn" maintenance separate from the pressures of trying to lose weight, if possible. I think it would make things easier for me psychologically.

I was planning on really teaching myself carb levels, how foods affect me, etc once I reached my next and final mini goal of 150. But, this week I am going to keep my carbs above 20 and below 25 this week, and see how that works out.

Another reason I am reluctant to mess with the carb thing is because I have been on a kind of plateau lately. I am reluctant to fully call it a plateau because it's only been two weeks, but I am pretty sure this is a real plateau. I think adding carbs would only hurt that, but like you said more carbs sometimes help so I'll give it a shot. I know it certainly isn't too many calories, most days I stay below 1600, and usually around 1300. I know thanksgiving I over ate and probably didn't burn any body fat at all, but the day before that I only had 700 calories to balance it out.

Anyway as I originally said, thanksgiving has taught me an important lesson, maintenance is easily just as hard and as important as losing weight itself. Like you said, so many people begin maintenance after losing all the weight, and without ever exploring psychological/behavioral issues of weight management, because the whole time they just sailed through induction with the hard capped limits on what you can eat. Once you're in the swing of it, induction is easy, sure, but remember how hard it was in the beginning? Thanksgiving has taught me maintenance is like that... it's like starting atkins all over again. On maintenance you are free to eat more, and so if you are free to eat more and haven't learned the behaviors needed to control yourself yet, naturally you will have a hard time. Every time I read a post where someone's answer to compulsive over eating is to simply avoid the "trigger food", I feel bad for them because I know that is not an effective long term strategy for weight management. You can't stay on induction forever, and while simply avoiding sugar alcohols and other things that taste sweet to you may work on induction, what are you going to do when you get to maintenance? Are you never going to eat berries and fruit again? Are you going to spend your whole life strictly limiting your intake of veggies? Induction was not designed to be livable for a reason. Dr. Atkins never planned on people spending their whole lives eating only cheese meat and very few veggies. I think too often people fall into the trap of viewing carbs like they do alcohol or drugs. While it is true people can develop compulsive dependencies on all three substances, however unlike alcohol or drugs, carbs themselves are not bad for you. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe people need to eat nutrient void sugars at all, but most of carbs are GOOD for you, and we shouldn't view them as poison. Almost complete abstinence from carbs as a maintenance strategy is not effective or healthy.

Also, people are also ignorant about maintenence... they see scale weight increase when they reincorporate carbs due to the water gain, and so they mistakenly believe they must stay at induction levels forever. Or, like I did on turkey day, they add too many carbs in for their body too fast, or eat them all in one big meal, or eat too many of the wrong kind of carbs and then mistakenly believe their body wasn't "designed" to eat more than induction level carbs because symptoms resurface. These pitfalls of maintenance and pre-maintenance are a big part of the battle in weight loss. We spend so much time worrying only about next week's weight loss that we neglect to see all weight loss is meaningless if it can't be maintained. Induction makes it too easy to just jump from preschool to entering the real world, and then you have the problems I ran into.

Sorry for rambling, these thoughts just came to me and I wanted to share them.