Thank you Janet.........Excellent advice and I loved the forum and video links!

In this case I feel the “means justifies the end” so I am indeed going to do the anonymous testing first. I am convinced I am right and I don’t want to lose this battle with bad timing or poor aim. If after a year I am still not seeing results I will have to reevaluate things. (Although the pounds are certainly flying off right now, hard to argue THAT one!).

As a side note, I do think there is one semi-valid argument from “the other side”. Specifically, that losing weight will improve your cardio risk factors NO MATTER HOW you do it. Basically they are trying to say that “what you are doing is long term unhealthy, but since one of the side effects from it is weight loss that yes, by default your short term cardio risk measurements will improve.” This could have been said about Fen-Phen too, we know long term it could kill you, but the short term weight loss seemingly improved risk factors (IE excess weight)....

I guess the point is that if we are really honest, there is not a lot of highly controlled long term studies. We know the diet (low carb) has been around for a long time, but are there actual studies that have tracked people on the diet for a long time?

I realize that someone has to go first, and this reminds me of the quote that “ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE THAT'S PROVEN TO WORK is called MEDICINE!”