O.k. I promised to write a bit on how this site came about, so here goes.

Last June, 2000 I was checking several boards and news groups to see if there's any information about low-carbing in Vancouver. I posted a message on eScribe-Atkins and found 2 Vancouverites on the Atkins eScribe board. I emailed them to see what they know, and if they'd be interested in sharing info over email. One said "yes", and one never replied. So, I created a list at eGroup and by the next day, the 2 of us were joined by about 5 and by week's end 10 more, and kept growing.

By the end of the month, the list was quite busy with members from all over Canada, and a few members from Washington, so we created another email list, low-carb Canada to make it available to all, not just Vancouverites.

We started our website on Geocities a month later, July 4th to be exact. it was at http://www.geocities.com/wwoha/lowcarbcanada.html The site kept getting bigger and our traffic increased, as well as the size, around 300 pages then. I simply wanted to post the info we discovered in the list to the world-wide web, since many emailed me directly to ask questions and didn't want to join a list, so I can just send them the link instead of typing the same info over and over.

The URL lowcarbcanada.com was registered 2 days later by someone else. And a year later, the URL is still under construction. I considered it a cyber-squatting incident, still do At the time Canadian URL registration was frozen, pending a move for URL registeration from UBC to a new entity called CIRA. I signed up not knowing if we'll get the name lowcarb.ca. After 6 months or so, we officially got it. But while waiting, I registered lowcarber.org to enable us to move from Geocities. Geocities was good, and still is for small sites, but if you have hundreds of pages to maintain, you need more power through scripting languages like Perl/PHP/MySQL etc. to mange things without editing each and every page when you want to change something, so we opted for a new commercial host (October 2000) with all these goodeis for me to play with

The new list kept growing as well, and I noticed, as did some other members, like Karen, that the discussion was too focused sometimes on LC products, and chocolates, which is fine, since that was initially what I had in mind for the list. But I learned later, and thanks to Karen, to think "outside the box", and started to focus more on real food, and not focus on low-carb "products". Don't get me wrong, I still like to know and publish where things are, and how to get them, but I didn't want the info in my face (well, in my email box anyway) every day, particularly when I'm week and cravings are hard to resist.

This lead me to think about the "forums" way of doing things. If you're into exercise, you know where to look, same for products, same for recipes, jokes, etc. I had some second thoughts about the forum, first, our members didn't like my hyper mood for constant changing . I learned this when I wanted to change the Vancouver list to a Canada list, and the emails started coming, encouragement, anger, protest. So, I decided to create another list (o.k. I was being a chicken). Second, there was already few forums/boards on the web, why reinvent the wheel? But I noticed the existing forums at the time were all Atkins, and one for PP. So I thought a general low-carb forum should be able to fill the gap. So, last October 2000 we played with a few software packages, and for a few weeks it seemed like there's only me, Doreen, Karen, Rachel and Sharon chatting with each other, but things slowly started picking up since then