I see the original poster is gone, but my 2 cents is that each person's chemistry is different.

I would never feel full on a low fat, high carb diet. Carbs just never made me feel full compared to eating a steak or other high protein foods.

I've eaten nearly a whole pound of dried pasta (cooked of course) at dinner and still didn't feel full. Cooked weight with sauce is probably close to two pounds of food!

Yes, I've been a glutton and had wild swings in my weight, but when I seriously diet, pretty much all the plans will work for me. That said, the Low Carb diet is the most fun. Previous to this diet, I used a diet that was similar but was called the drinking man's diet. I lost about 30lbs and got smashed about twice a week and had a blast.

Atkins doesn't encourage drinking, but I am a scotch drinker so it's great to be able to have a few drinks occasionally without going off diet. For those who don't like drinking hard liquor straight, I found the LC marguerita mix with tequila to be surprisingly delicious!

As far as his comment about 6 miles with an 80lb backpack, altitude gain is a big factor. On a 11 day backpack trip we were routinely backpacking 15-20 miles per day and 5000 ft gain with 30-40lbs packs.

Doing that, no need to worry about LC, LF or dieting as you cannot possibly eat as much food as the calories you are burning is around 5000+ calories per day. Every one in my group was losing about 2 pounds per day and eating as much as we possibly could. In the 11 days 150+ (2 layover days) miles I dropped about 20 pounds when I wasn't trying to lose weight.

Er, got OT but my main comment is people are different and to categorize us all in one is wrong.