I heartily agree with all the comments given here. People truly believe that this diet is somehow a magic thing and that lbs will fly away as long as you stick to it religiously. I would bet that if one could enter the stats into a graph, with everyone eating exactly the same way, you would get a normal curve..so that a few people don't lose easily, a lot lose in a moderate fashion, and a few lose heaps quickly. The factors that impact weight loss that are not discussed in sufficient depth are: the amount total you have to lose, your age (the younger, the easier), the number of times you have yoyo dieted in your life, hormone factors, the fact that the big initial loss is lbs of water, and after that expect slower loss of mainly fat tissue, the total stupidity of relying on daily scales weighing, the normality of plateaus, etc. To me, the superstitious digging for mysterious stall inducing items is a big waste of time for the most part. I think people should be educated about all this and understand the following: low carb means a healthier diet with the absence of sugar and processed starches; there is a slight metabolic advantage to low carbing but calories must be adjusted down as you lose; the main advantage comes from the satiety effect and not feeling hungry/deprived; the importance of not dropping calories too low; the importance of focusing on making this a WOL rather than a 'diet' that you go on only long enough to lose weight; you are not 'cheating' when you eat junk any more than you are 'cheating' when you shoot up heroin...you are doing damage to yourself by choice. I think they should leave out the fat fast notion as a 'stall breaker' as I am dubious about the health aspects of doing this.

These are some of the things I feel must be changed...I hope someone passes these posts on to the Atkins folks.

Val