I am truly scared to add carbo's back in. It's been slow for me and only after7 weeks I lost 10 lbs. I had mistakes in between. However, I have been reading other's thread about adding carbo's. What extra carbo's would you add in? Fruit? I am afraid that the weight loss would go even slower. I know I didn't put this weight on overnight. Please help.

Atkins says to add first more veggies, then fruit and last nuts. But I went and added in extra's like diet cheesecake once in a while or a moouse. Never was much of a veggie person.

What I did was first add veggies such as broccoli, articoke hearts, onions and green beans (you can add tomatoes, I can't - allergic).
For Fruit I added: Blackberries, Raspberries and Strawberries.. can be addicted so keep the portion small.
I also add Wasa Bread, fiber rich for 5 carbs with peanut butter (use ones with 6 carbs) this can help bring your carbs up.

Hope this helped

to the Atkins website that talks about the order to add more carbs:
Carbohydrate Ladder

I must admit that I passed right by the first 2 categories & have added berries & nuts since I've been off Induction. It very well could have slowed my loss but to me it was worth it to eat those luscious strawberries a couple times a week.

If you want to be careful about adding the carbs in, you should read the section on OWL (ongoing weight loss) because he does have rules to follow. Here's the link to the rules & there are other articles you can get to from this page:
Rules of OWL

Hope this helps & good luck!!

I think the type of carbs you should add depends on why you're adding carbs back in. Are you exercising hard and feeling like you need a little more energy? Add an ounce or two of nuts -- macadamias are the best -- because the extra protein and fat will also help your energy needs. Are you eating (not overeating) the proper amounts of protein and fat, but still hungry at meals? Add an extra cup or two of approved veggies, which almost certainly won't slow your weight loss. If you're missing something sweet, try some strawberries with cottage cheese and splenda (my new fave breakfast), or sugar-free yogurt (you can subtract 8g of the carbs on the label, since they're from the lactose sugars consumed by the yogurt bacteria). However, I wouldn't add any of the low-carb dessert stuff back in until you've determined that you can still lose weight even at 25 or 30g. It'll just be that much more unpleasant if you have to cut back to 20g in order to keep losing weight!

When I was still in the weight-loss phases, my own personal rule was to keep my non-veggie carbs at about 10g per day, and then just eat all the veggies I wanted without really counting them. I didn't eat any Atkins bars at all unless I was in an emergency food situation, limited myself to one Pure DeLite bar per week, and had no more than two glasses of wine or low-carb beers per week. I made low-carb desserts once a month and didn't eat more than one serving of them a day. All of that stuff came out of my non-veggie 10g, meaning that I had to cut back on my cream, cheese, nuts, and splenda on those days. I didn't really eat any low-carb breads or crackers, but that also would have come out of that 10g.

Unless you've got a dairy problem, I would think you could eat 30g of carbs as long as only about 10 come from "other stuff". There may be someone out there who stalled from too many vegetables, but I've never actually seen it happen! On the other hand, lots of people can't handle higher levels of dairy, nuts, and sweeteners, and you should probably be careful until you find out if you're one of them. So if there's a particular food you want to add, go ahead, but sacrifice some other non-veggie carbs for it until you get a little better feel for your own carb intake levels!

Oh, and one other thing: if you start experimenting, and you do slow down or stop losing for a week or two, don't stress out about it, 'kay? Nobody is going to jump out of your closet and hand you a prize if you hit goal a week or a month earlier or later . Learning what you can and can't handle is an important process, so don't be afraid of doing that just because you might stop losing. Maybe you will, maybe you won't, but so what? If you do, the experiment didn't work, and that's it -- think about it like it's science, not like it's some personal failure in your battle with the Devil Box!

When you begin to add carbs back to the diet , it should be and extra 5 grams per day. This is to slow weight loss. When weight loss ceases then you subtract 5 grams.

After leaving induction I have added just a few more carbs. I have lost 9 lbs. on induction and I have since, lost 2 to 3 lbs. per month after adding just a few more carbs. You have lost slower than I did and I am not in a hurry to add to many carbs to my diet. So just really watch this. This is why weighing every day can be helpful. Also, if you get on the scale and discover that you hae gained 3 or 5 lbs don't panic. Just stay with the diet, reduce a carb or 2 and see what happens the next morning.

Black57

Sorry, black57, but I have to disagree with this -- I think this is where weighing every day can be spectacularly *unhelpful*, unless you're weighing every day and then taking the weekly average as your actual weight. If your weight changes a measurable amount from day to day, it is a meaningless water fluctuation and is absolutely not related to your carb intake levels. There's just no way that a serving of any food with 5g of carbs can translate into a 3500-calorie, 454g pound of actual fat weight! If I up my intake by 5g of berries, but also have a steak marinated in Dale's, I'm going to gain a pound or two in the morning -- but it's water retention from the salty Dale's, not the strawberries! Of course, if my weekly weigh-in is the morning after that, I'm also going to show a net gain for the week, which is why daily weighing + averaging is superior to either daily or weekly weighing alone.

I think even a week is an awfully short time to decide what impact adding/reducing carbs is going to have on your weight, because our bodies fluctuate for so many reasons -- two weeks or a month is probably a more reasonable time period. I've seen a lot of people decide that they can't lose at any more than 20g, because they get off induction, add a few carbs back, hit the famous post-induction stall, and blame it on those extra 5g of carbs. I think it's a shame to deprive yourself of stuff like berries and nuts if you can handle them -- true, some people can't, but a week isn't enough to tell if you're one of them.

I am struggling with the same issues. I added a daily serving of berries into my diet after induction and have gained weight.


TODAY ...i VOW....I will forgo the fruits a little longer and eat additional veggies for my extra carbs and see what happens.

Keep your fingers crossed that the weight comes off.

On scale management: I have to agree that weighing daily and then take the average seems the most fair way to do it. My weight fluctuates too much from one day to the next. When I see the numbers bouncing down more that up, I am happy!

And when I am happy I am motivated to do in again tommorrow!

Thanks to y'all for your understanding and support,
carol