Bravo on an excellent post.

I agree whole heartedly with your original statement, that low carb works because you naturally feel less hungry, and therefore eat less. Before low carb, I naturally ate 3000 calories a day on average, which brought me to my incredible high weight. I attribute my intense hunger to the types of foods I was eating, because the *day* I started low carb I was amazed to find I did not want to eat more than normal portions. It wasn't because I don't like the food, either - I have always been a carnivore, I only ate the other junk because it was there not cause I fancied it.

IF people just start "cutting the carbs" back a little but eating the same amount of calories - that is using the faux low carb stuff to replace the real high carb junk, they will be quite disappointed. However if you follow the atkins plan correctly, you won't be doing this. Atkins SPECIFICALLY states: eat only until you are satiated. He does not give a liscence to eat specifically for pleasure, meaning once you are full if you are still eating just for taste/fun/boredom you are not doing atkins properly. Furthermore, if doing the atkins plan correctly, you should be satiated with a normal amount of food.

I do not see low carb going the way of low fat, because low fat was NOT self limiting like low carb food is. On low fat, you could easily inhale a box of snackwells and still be looking for more food... on low carb, try to inhale that same box of low carb/high fat cookies and you will soon find yourself uncomfortably full after a few of them. In other words, it is possible to over eat and gain weight on low carb, but you would have to really make an effort to do it. I mean, you would have to be *totally* ignoring natural hunger/satiety signals and just be eating for gluttony.

I think this fear of low carb being abused like low fat comes from the very incorrect misconception that all obese people became obese because they are disgusting gluttons who gorged despite fullness. In reality most obese people simply made poor food choices whether due to poverty, poor education about nutrition/misinfluence, or what have you. We simply choose foods with very low satiety values that mess up your metabolism big time, and because of this we were rarely full. We ate far too many calories not because we were eating beyond our hunger, but because our hunger had known no bounds.

Since low carb addresses and rectifies the problem of unnaturally high hunger, I am not afraid people will gain weight with low carb. I am afraid people might not lose weight using the junk food (that is easily acomplished if one eats until they are very full all the time), but I think it would be hard to *gain* weight and *become* more obese on low carb (even a half *ssed version), whereas it was only all too easy to become obese on low fat.