Thanks Janet!
Time may have printed off fewer copies than normal, thinking it wouldn't sell.

I was a member of the McDougall BB too. When I was having all sorts of allergic responses (to virtually everything on the McDougall diet; all the carbs and too little protein - 45g - were making me angry & sick) one of the nice posters said "maybe McDougall isn't for you - have you checked out the Protein Power forum?" That was in 1999 and I haven't looked back!

I'm really surprised by that! Was that back when the McDougall forum was part of VegSource? He has his own website now and a new forum. I doubt anyone would make such a suggestion now, and if they did it would most likely be removed.

There was recently a member (yes, I still check in and read there...don't know why) who was a very vocal critic of anything lowcarb/paleo. He started having blood sugar problems and asked for help. He finally ate a steak and was blown away by his good blood glucose numbers afterwards. He posted about his success and decision to go paleo and was immediately banned.

I wonder if that was me! I used to follow both forums. Vegsource because I thought it would balance out my exposure to ideas and I needed to get the other point of view. And also because it was like not being able to stop watching a train wreck, I'm sorry to confess! I even read the McDougall book way back when but just couldn't make myself go for it, it seemed like such a bad fit for me.

I'd never heard of the McDougall diet, so I just googled it and read the list of "What to Eat" and "What not to eat". Wow. If there is such a place as Diet Hell -- for me, that would be it. No eggs, no dairy, no meat, no chocolate, no coffee??? Eat starchy veggies and grains? I could not follow that diet even if I wanted to. Eating LC is like diet heaven for me.

McDougal. Always brings back this favorite Mark's Daily Apple post:

My Escape from Vegan Island

I ate that way in the 90's while exercising like a fiend. It was the way you were "supposed" to eat. But when injured or otherwise couldn't exercise like a fiend, it piled on the pounds.

I was looking at a third round, at my highest weight ever, when I discovered Atkins. And thank heavens I did!

One of the things I appreciate about this forum in the journals area is that people get to know each other and food just ceases to matter. There are people who go weight watchers, who go vegan (seriously), who are paleo and liberally dose themselves with high-carb fruits and recipes in maple syrup all over the place, and Nobody. Really. Cares. because these are your friends and everybody is on a constant N=1 experimental path to figure out what the heck works for their body, and many people go through all kinds of different efforts. If you have a diff food approach you either don't comment on food in their journal -- ideally there is their life, events, thoughts, and so on to comment on -- or you support whatever they're doing.

This is really the way the world oughtta be if you ask me.

PJ

I guess I was lucky that I saw the message about Protein Power posted by Seejay or some other "troll" before it got removed from McDougall's forum.

And I exercised like a fiend too - 10.5 hrs/week while starving on 1100 cals/day. If I ate more or exercised less, I gained weight on McDougall's Diet Hell diet, which was slightly more moderate than Pritikin's, which I followed before that.

Isn't that just awful, in retrospect? Talk about wrecking your lean body mass and slowing the metabolism to nothing.

It reminds me of a neat article I saw once, from a trainer who was helping a client LOSE muscle. The client was transitioning from male to female...

Lose Muscle! Gain Fat! Dieting for MTFs