Sonja, this kind of thing actually amuses me now. All you need to do is a bit of rhetorical analysis to find such statements ridiculous.

Burning fat a harmful state? Not if you're 150 or even 50 or 10 pounds overweight. The only way to lose fat is to burn it--duh! This one always makes me chuckle.

I get five servings of vegetables--and people doing PP/Atkins right get more veggies on this WOE than they got on pyramid eating. And more than physicians, btw, have been proven to eat in recent studies.

"Balanced" eating is such a bizarre word. Balanced according to whom? God did not come down from the clouds and say that 2/3 of ones calories should be gotten from grains. Vaguely defined terms make for poor argumentation.

Since over half of people who are overweight have binged on carbs in the past, LC plans exactly DO teach better eating habits--three meals a day rather than snacking or skipping meals, vegetables at two meals (or three), eating to satiety...sounds like better eating habits to me!

I try to remind myself that naturally thin people whose logic is addled by too many grains/too much sugar write such things.

And, less amusedly, I ask, where were they when we all went on 500 calorie diets in the 70's and 80's? Were they talking about the "strictness" of those? In fact, they overtly or secretly thought that was a good idea for us "pigs" to restrict ourselves because, as "everyone knows," obesity is all about character and self-control and not at all about metabolism or genetics, blah blah blah blah. (Just as "everyone" once "knew" that leeches were good for fever and that psychosis was possession by a demon.) Fat people are damned if they do and damned if they don't--sometimes I think thin people hate Atkins because it can be successful, and then they can't run around and feel falsely superior to fat people any more. Fat burning does become dangerous, then--but not to the fat people.