there's no hard and fast answer to that question, anngie, sorry! Some people can eat LC treats with artificial sweeteners, and not see their weight loss slow at all. Others will stall for weeks until they eliminate sweeteners, LC shakes and bars, bacon, dairy, eggs, or nuts...the list goes on and on and is different for everyone.

If you truly stall at some point--no pounds OR inches loss at all for a month--then eliminating everything but veggies and pure meats and adding one item off the "likely to stall" list back in every week until weight loss halts again. In this way, you can find out what your own "stall" foods are.

The other issue about artificial sweeteners is that some of us believe that an addiction to the sweet taste, a desire to run to sweets to treat emotional crises is itself a problem. If we don't change the underlying chain of behaviors that got us fat, we'll probably get fat again. So eliminating all sweets or limiting to them to only once a month or five times a year (or whatever), seeing them as "baddies" and not "goodies" is part of the self-healing process for many long-term LCers who are focused on maintenance issues.

HTH