After quitting smoking a year and a half ago, I'm on the low carb diet to get rid of the weight I picked up.  I went from 220 to 255 - my worst expectation!  I’m also diabetic which makes the problems of losing weight even harder.

 Almost all diets are doomed to failure.  Starving stinks!  I have no want to live agonizing over a piece of cheesecake for the rest of my life

 Now at 225 again and dropping after a month!  Hard to believe?  Yes, but true.  What's more, I'm eating!  Not starving.  On this diet, the higher the fat content, the better!  This is how to send your dietitian into shock.

The diet is based on Dr. Robert Atkins books, and I noticed it working with a couple of my friends, one of whom is a doctor.  They both suffered from chronic obesity, yet both had trimmed their weight to the point of being nearly underweight.

The diet is based on high protein and fat content in everything you eat - eliminating almost all the carbohydrates – sugars and white flour – replacing it with meats and protein.  You also drink tons of water to clear your system, because as you go through carbohydrate withdrawal you burn up your body’s supply of glycogen, the fuel it makes from carbohydrates.  Every molecule of glycogen in your blood has three molecules of water attached to it, so when you eliminate the glycogen you lose a lot of water weight immediately. 

 This is called the induction phase of the diet.  You’re limited to 20 grams of carb per day which is the equivalent of about 10 potato chips.

 When it comes to foods with no carbs; meats, fish, chicken, and eggs – you can eat all you want.  Add to that reasonable amounts of cheese and nuts and you’ve got the exact opposite of every diet in existence!

 The downside of the diet is that there’s not a lot of variety to the foods available, and almost nothing is available that you don’t have to cook and prepare.  For instance, there are no breads available, ready made.  However you can make low carb bread from Gluten flour.

 You eat the foods with the highest fat content.  Real butter has zero carb.  Heavy cream is used in a lot of what you make.

 I missed the taste of citrus fruit in my diet, but got around it by using unsweetened drink mixes with artificial sweeteners.  (In fact, the only non-natural thing in this diet is artificial sweetener)

 For a snack food, theres’ nuts and cheese but also pork rinds which contain zero carbs and can be eaten with heavy sour cream!

 Have you lost your mind?

 Get used to having your friends and your doctor tell you you’re crazy!  They will tell you that you’ll do yourself incredible harm and try to get you to give it up and go back to something sensible…and be fat again!

 If you look at true carnivores, animals that live on a strict diet of meat and very little else, they are exceptionally lean and trim.  When’s the last time you saw a fat lion?

 Word of caution – read the Atkins diet books before you start this one!  Don’t try it without learning more about what you’re doing, because if you try to do this one in combination with a lot of carb, the results will be poor and could be bad for your health!