Hello. I have been on atkins since march, almost 8 months now. I have stayed faithful at 15-25 carbs daily. I decided, since I have such good control over my hunger and abilityto resist cravings now, I would splurge calorically and in carbs. I decided to let myself have about 35 carbs and 1800-2000 calories. I was preparing a low carb friendly feast, so I figured it would be pretty easy to do this. Wrong. I wound up eating over 2200 cals and 45 carbs. Not a HUGE "cheat", but still the loss of control scared me... brought back naughty memories.
I felt bloated and uncomfortable, and yet I still wanted to eat. I didn't like that feeling, psychologically. It made me realize something about myself.

1) The feeling of control Atkins has given me is largely an illusion. I find it easy on normal days to stay within my carb and calorie allotment, because in my mind I have limited my food choices. I have forbade myself from eating things that are high in carbs. When I go into maintenence it will be more difficult to maintain control. It will be easy to get caught up in the carb cycle if I am not careful. In maintenence my food choices are more diverse, which leads to more "snacking", which leads to eating to eating more carbs, which leads to more irrational hunger, which leads to even more carbs, etc etc.

2) Do not reincorporate a lot of carbs into the diet at once. I must make sure to add hem slowly when I do transition to maintenence, so I can adjust psychologically and physically. Adding just 25 extra carbs all at once made some of my symptoms come back - I feel very shaky, like I am starving, etc.

3) I really really need to work on eating when not hungry. All thanksgiving I felt like bloated and crappy, but I still wanted to eat a lot. Not good.

All in all, I am glad I had a low carb Thanksgiving with diverse maintenence type food. It taught me a valuable lesson about maintenence, myself, and the diet.

I agree with you. This week I was wondering how pre-maintenance and maintenance would be. In some way Induction and OWl is very safe. There is too much to learn!
Isiar

That was very well written and I largely agree!

But at 35 pounds from goal, after losing so much (very very big congratulations!!) maybe you should start progressing through OWL?

There are (many - do a search) posts on the maintenence board about the difficulty people have waiting to near goal before they up there carbs, and that they find they have an abnormally low CCL, and can't stop cheating. Going above 25 carbs need not be 'transition to maintenance' it can be continuing to lose!

If you are staying low because you are losing slowly, many say upping carbs helps them start to lose quicker.

I think you make some very good points about control and choice. I have reintroduced 1 food a week, and am now at '(lower-carb) bread week' which so far is much more difficult then strawberry week, yogurt week, etc!! Becuase I am still on a 'diet' not maintaining, I am not in a rush to eat 'normally' and overdo it..

I dunno, just my thoughts.

Oh, and I am in Australia so no Thanksgiving... but surely the whole Thanksigiving and Christmas being so close together thing must be difficult to the weight conscious!!

hi again

mb99 - Yes, the reason i still stay around induction levels is because i wanted the weight to come off as fast as possible. I would prefer to "learn" maintenance separate from the pressures of trying to lose weight, if possible. I think it would make things easier for me psychologically.

I was planning on really teaching myself carb levels, how foods affect me, etc once I reached my next and final mini goal of 150. But, this week I am going to keep my carbs above 20 and below 25 this week, and see how that works out.

Another reason I am reluctant to mess with the carb thing is because I have been on a kind of plateau lately. I am reluctant to fully call it a plateau because it's only been two weeks, but I am pretty sure this is a real plateau. I think adding carbs would only hurt that, but like you said more carbs sometimes help so I'll give it a shot. I know it certainly isn't too many calories, most days I stay below 1600, and usually around 1300. I know thanksgiving I over ate and probably didn't burn any body fat at all, but the day before that I only had 700 calories to balance it out.

Anyway as I originally said, thanksgiving has taught me an important lesson, maintenance is easily just as hard and as important as losing weight itself. Like you said, so many people begin maintenance after losing all the weight, and without ever exploring psychological/behavioral issues of weight management, because the whole time they just sailed through induction with the hard capped limits on what you can eat. Once you're in the swing of it, induction is easy, sure, but remember how hard it was in the beginning? Thanksgiving has taught me maintenance is like that... it's like starting atkins all over again. On maintenance you are free to eat more, and so if you are free to eat more and haven't learned the behaviors needed to control yourself yet, naturally you will have a hard time. Every time I read a post where someone's answer to compulsive over eating is to simply avoid the "trigger food", I feel bad for them because I know that is not an effective long term strategy for weight management. You can't stay on induction forever, and while simply avoiding sugar alcohols and other things that taste sweet to you may work on induction, what are you going to do when you get to maintenance? Are you never going to eat berries and fruit again? Are you going to spend your whole life strictly limiting your intake of veggies? Induction was not designed to be livable for a reason. Dr. Atkins never planned on people spending their whole lives eating only cheese meat and very few veggies. I think too often people fall into the trap of viewing carbs like they do alcohol or drugs. While it is true people can develop compulsive dependencies on all three substances, however unlike alcohol or drugs, carbs themselves are not bad for you. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe people need to eat nutrient void sugars at all, but most of carbs are GOOD for you, and we shouldn't view them as poison. Almost complete abstinence from carbs as a maintenance strategy is not effective or healthy.

Also, people are also ignorant about maintenence... they see scale weight increase when they reincorporate carbs due to the water gain, and so they mistakenly believe they must stay at induction levels forever. Or, like I did on turkey day, they add too many carbs in for their body too fast, or eat them all in one big meal, or eat too many of the wrong kind of carbs and then mistakenly believe their body wasn't "designed" to eat more than induction level carbs because symptoms resurface. These pitfalls of maintenance and pre-maintenance are a big part of the battle in weight loss. We spend so much time worrying only about next week's weight loss that we neglect to see all weight loss is meaningless if it can't be maintained. Induction makes it too easy to just jump from preschool to entering the real world, and then you have the problems I ran into.

Sorry for rambling, these thoughts just came to me and I wanted to share them.

Very interesting discussion. I too ate about 45 carbs and lots of cals for the last 2 days. I DID NOT like that full feeling either! You are right, it will be hard and there are soooo many factors! I'm hoping, just like we learned to live with induction -- we will also learn to live with maintenance. Induction was hard at first too. But after a few weeks we learned new recipes, got used to our limits and then it was totally livable.

I think I big factor is the mindset. This is a WOE not a diet we go "off' of. I've gone off diets in the past and gained rather quickly. I hope moving through OWL (and taking practice runs on holidays) will help us learn.

I've recently gone through a slow bout of weight loss. 4 weeks nothing, lost a pound or so and then another 3 week dry spell. I've been trying to add a few more carbs taking the same advice of sometimes more carbs gets things moving. It's too early to tell but I think it may be working. I've lost a few pounds in the last few weeks so I'm hoping it continues.

Good luck on your journey through OWL and maintenance. I'm not sure how it will all work out but I believe taking it slow, it will work out.

Another thing to consider is where were those extra carbs coming from. It may be that you've identified some trigger foods that you will need to stay away from or limit as you move towards maintainace and it wasn't the level of carbs, per se, but where they were coming from. For example, some people can increase their carbs using higher carb veggies, nuts or some fruits and not have a problem, but when they try to add grains back in...bingo! Carb cravings come roaring back. Different people have different trigger foods, but grains (either refined or whole) seem to be one that is more common.

For me it's dairy. I have to seriously moderate it because almost all kinds are a trigger for me.

Fruits, and grains no prob. That is why OWL is such an important step to this plan. You learn about your body and what it can handle before you try to jump to maintanance. Increasing carbs slowly also helps your body to rebuild a tolerence for them.