Hi!

I'm fairly new to Atkins, been doing it for about one full week. I've done a lot of reading and research, and had extensive conversations with friends who it has worked for. I've struggled with being overweight since I was about 10 years old. When I was about 13, I went to a dietition and he put me on a diet similar to atkins. Amazingly, I had lost 15 pounds in about a week. For some reason, and I really don't remember what, I stopped doing it. Anyway, I'm certain this has been my problem all along, and now 13 years later, I'm determined to make this work for me and change my life.

First off, I am seriously overweight. It's really to the point that I have a lot of trouble exercising because I get tired so quickly, howerver I do try to walk for about 15 minutes every day... and plan to gradually increase that as the weight comes off.

I just have a couple concerns. First, I've read a lot of posts in this forum and elsewhere saying I should be eating 10 to 12x my body weight in calories. The problem with that is that since I've started, I have almost no appetite. Even thinking about food makes me cringe lately, and I can't imagine forcing myself to eat that much. I'm concerned that the lack of calories I'm eating now will cause me to stop losing weight, which I of course don't want.

I've been drinking Atkins shakes for breakfast because I have no time in the morning to cook, usually have some sort of meat (turkey, chicken, beef) for lunch, usually with cheese and a small salad. I'm having to force food in for dinner, which I hate. The last few days I've only been able to eat a couple slices of cheese and maybe some tuna fish. I'm usually only getting 10 - 15g of carbs per day, and maybe 1200 - 1500 calories.

I thought at first maybe I just didn't have an appetite because I wasn't wanting to eat the foods that were ok, but even when I think about eating those high carb foods I used to stuff myself with, NOTHING sounds good.

Is this something I can expect to pass? Should I be forcing myself to eat more even though I feel like it'll make me sick?

I really appreciate any feedback anyone can offer. I apologize in advance if this has already been covered in another post, but there are a lot of them to search through