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Overstaying Induction and the KIND of Carbs We Eat
17 Aug 2005


Be very careful about staying on induction too long.  There are a lot of reasons why that is generally a bad idea.


The reason so many people screw up when they move from induction to ongoing weight loss is because they don't really or totally follow the rules for adding carbs, they start adding crap carbs (sometimes slowly, sometimes practically overnight) and the diet starts morphing into 20-40 crap carbs of cheese, processed meats, nuts, a little fruit, and almost no veggies.  They move to the land of cream cheese and Splenda dietary methadone.


If you do it CORRECTLY, by eating more than half of your daily carbs from veggies, and then increase the amount of veggies as you continue, in most cases it will actually work better to add MORE GOOD carbs. 


To keep hedging your bets toward steady success, get and keep the percentage of your carbs from veggies as high as possible, be especially careful about sticking to the limits on cheese and the "special category foods", and be as truthful as you can with yourself about how YOU really do with nuts, if you add them.  Be aware that the food choices that eventually end up running the vast majority of folks into the ditch are foods with cream/cheese, artificial sweeteners, and grains (see below).


If you really want to hedge your bets, I'd recommend NOT adding lowcarb or grain products (such as bars, crackers, lowcarb breads/tortillas, anything that contains rice, millet, corn, wheat, barley, spelt, quinoa, etc.), until you are MUCH further along in this journey, preferably all the way to goal and well into maintenance.  I recommend this because of what I feel are the overwhelming odds that most of us (~80-90%) are what I would term addicted eaters.  Nothing to single anyone out here, just that it sure seems like the vast majority of people who end up significantly overweight DO fall into that category.  And one of the traits that addicted eaters seem to have in common that puts us into this category is that we were either born with, or somewhere along the line we developed, a physical intolerance to grains.  After we’ve eliminated them for a long time, we find they bring on a lot of the symptoms that lowcarbing "magically" eliminated—water retention, bloating, swelling, cravings, weight loss stalls/gain.  


Most long-term successes I know never eat grains (OR sugar), even in maintenance.


Unfortunately, IMO it is way too easy to get the (mistaken) impression from the Atkins books that this is all about the NUMBER of carbs.  It's not.  It's mostly about the KIND.


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Adele Stratton

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