this is my second go with atkins. lost over 100lbs first time round. but I got back into the carb eating frenzy again. and now 35 lbs back. wont do that again. But anyway, I found the most important part of this diet besides eatin of course, is exercise! FORGET hours on the treadmill etc. You will not be able to do this, to boring and takes to long. Instead Use strength training. This way you weight loss will be fat and not muscle. As well a 30 minute work out with weights keeps you body in the burning mode for hours afterwards versus cardio is over 20-30 minutes after you stop.Oh and WATER< WATER<WATER.

To be honest i havent yet got into exercise mode yet.. sometimes it takes a little while for that to kick in when i diet on atkins. Thanks for all the great tips here, i must admit that the first time i did atkins i lost 20lbs which was great but after a few years on returning to it, each time i failed , after about 5 weeks. I now know from this great forum, it was because i was eating too many sweetish things like the atkins bars and soya flour pancakes with no carb syrups.. yes they sure tasted lovely but each day i was wanting more sweet things. this time around, I am trying to stick to the basics and I am not adding any soya flour or ground almonds to the diet.. today as i am over a month into the atkins diet, i had a handful of blueberries with some whipped cream they tasted so sweet !
I am a little worried they may stall me but we just got to be careful of the things that stall us and i will see what happens!
Maybe fruit will have to be a nono for a bit longer!
Great thread!

Thanks all for the info and encouragement, I hope to be as successful as some of you.

I know I'm new to this, but I do have a few tips that have convinced both myself and my husband that we can make this liefstyle change.

1. Make a menu plan and stick to it. Also, I've always heard that you should shop the perimeter of the grocery store. I've found this to be incredibly accurate. The only thing I ventured into the ailes for was canned beans and salad dressing!

2. Look for recipes online and try a few new ones each week. We have already found several new recipes that we really like. I know that having meals that we truly enjoy will help us stick to the plan.

3. This may seem obvious, but throw out or donate all the high carb food in the house. The other night I caught my husband eating a big bowl of cereal that I didn't realize was still in the pantry. Needless to say, it's gone now and we are much less tempted to cheat when there isn't any food available to cheat with!

how many grams of fat can you eat per day?

Just dusting off, spiffing up, and getting ready for the increased traffic that I'm sure we're going to see in the next few days.

Welcome Newbies and the best of luck!

Remember.....Progress not perfection.

Lisa

The absolute best advice I can give is to pick a plan and follow it. Thinking you can *do it on your own* may or may not work, but the tried and true with the research behind it is a sure bet. Also thinking you can *cheat* may or may not work, but very frequently it ends up in a downward spiral that sends you right back to where you came from.

Per Lisa's request, I'm putting my standard "newbie advice post" here.

Welcome to the forum, newcomer!. I suggest that you pick a specific LC plan to follow, then read the book for that plan (you'll have to look on the Primal Blueprint site for that diet's description). Otherwise, you'll be reading and getting contradictory suggestions and won't know which ones to pay attention to.

There are also two good posts in the Newbies' Questions section that will save you from making a lot of newcomer mistakes. One bit of information that's not commonly stressed (yet) is the importance (IMO) of setting a target body fat % rather than a target weight. The BF% statistic should determine your goal weight, not the other way around. Here's a web page that explains more about why you should set your BF% target first. You can start with this page; be sure to look at the age-adjusted chart for your gender.

Next, calculate your current percentage of body fat. The best tests (dunk tank and BodPod) are very accurate (within 1%) and very expensive. Calipers are next best (within 1-2%) but cost about $15 and require practice (and some personal guidance) to use skillfully. All other methods are accurate to within 3-5%. If you have a tape measure, you can use this online body fat % calculator.

Then, calculate your ideal body weight.

Be prepared to feel under the weather for about 2 weeks. The symptom even has a nickname: induction flu (terminology from the Atkins diet). Your body's adjusting to an abrupt shift in its primary fuel source, and forum members report symptoms of being fuzzy-headed, fatigued, and achy. The most intense part of it lasts 2–3 weeks; full adaptation takes 6–8 weeks. Make sure you're eating enough fat (your new primary fuel) so that your body doesn't think it's starving. Many forum members aim for 65–75% of calories as fat.

Next, be kind to your body during the adaptation/induction period. You're shocking your body, suddenly depriving it of its usual fuel source and forcing it to use another it's not yet fully equipped to do. Reduce exercise to some mild, 30-minute walks a few times/week. During my first time low-carbing, it was about 6 weeks before I felt like working out, and then I had such a rush of energy that you couldn't have stopped me.

Also, due to the large volume of water loss during this time (as the body uses up its major glycogen stores), you're likely to lose a lot of electrolytes in that water:

• Calcium
• Magnesium
• Potassium
• Sodium

It would be prudent to supplement all of these during induction/adaptation:

• Calcium-Magnesium: buy a good cal-mag pill. I use the Pioneer brand, made from ground cow bones, because it has all the co-factors (e.g., silica and boron) required to assimilate calcium.
• Potassium-Sodium: 4-8 oz of regular/low-sodium V8 daily. The regular stuff has 470mg K and 420 mg. Na/cup, and the low-sodium stuff has 819mg. K and 141mg Na/cup. Be aware that V8 has 8g net carbs per 8 oz.

Even after induction, keep an eye on your potassium and magnesium intake; hardly anyone gets enough. The body needs 2mg of potassium/calorie eaten daily, and about 400 mg magnesium daily (50% of calcium intake, and 10%-15% of potassium intake). Tools like MY P.L.A.N. on this site enable you to make good estimates about your intake from food.

Dr. Mike Eades has a good post about supplements to take when re-starting low-carbing that's useful, too.

After my first six weeks of low-carbing, I've tried to get all my electrolyte minerals from food, because I can never know how much I'm absorbing from a pill.

Lastly, check in and contribute here frequently, even if it's just to start a journal. Because you'll be eating a "strange" diet to most people, you'll need support; I guarantee that someone will warn you that eating all that fat will give you a heart attack and "all that protein" will explode your kidneys. This forum is a true virtual community, full of knowledge, wisdom, and caring people.

Choosing a version of Atkins seems to be a matter of personal choice among forum members. The biggest difference in the newest version of the plan is that it's more permissive in some ways, has options for vegetarians, and has been updated to reflect the latest science.

Here are some discussions on the differences:

• Discussion 1
• Discussion 2
• Discussion 3
• Discussion 4
• Discussion 5

Many of us encounter a lot of ignorance from our families, friends, and co-workers about low-carb eating. There are some good myth-busting pages on the Web to defend/explain yourself:

• About.com's top low-carb myths
• Ketogenic-diet-resource's keto myths

These pages could use a few more recent research citations to convince doctors. If anyone wants to contribute some (you'd think I'd know them all by now), let's collect them here, and I'll pass them along to the respective list authors.

I have to say I found this comment from the first posting to be extremely motivating:

Dieting is hard--don't let anybody try and tell you it's not. Being fat is hard. Pick your hard. [I]

Thanks for that!

You're welcome

I'm an idiot, I don't know why I didn't read this thread in it's entirety before

(Lisa, reading this all at once, it cracked me up you preparing end of December each year for all the newbies about to decend on you. And it's also very sweet of you)

My tip is that if you're on medication, speak to your doc about it. The books always say 'see your doctor' and even if you have and they know you're trying to lose weight, be specific about your concerns. I'm on 2000mg metformin for my PCOS/insulin resistance. I couldn't get through the induction flu, I just felt so awful at 20g. But the more I read about why this WOE works for insulin resistance, the sillier it seemed to eat a level of carbs that met the needs of my medication (and it kept making me hungry, and gave me cravings). I spoke to my doctor and told her I was on low carb, but I was feeling really ill and so she's cut my dosage. And now I feel great. It really is important to get dosages adjusted - docs will medicate based on what they assume you're eating.

wow, ur weight loss is great

When eating lifestyles are radically different in a household:

You should at the very least, try for the following:
1. Mutual respect: don't say disparaging things to each other about what the other person is eating. Meal time should be comfortable for everyone.
2. Acknowledgment in the fact your both adults: meaning you don't have to feel you have to "save them" from their eating habits and you don't need "saving" from yours (if they don't agree with LC). As adults, you are both individually responsible for what goes in your mouth. It is insulting to have a spouse "going parental" on you, and is more likely to serve to add more friction than to "win" someone over to your way of thinking. My hubby and I have agreed to disagree on some points.

This is part of a post was originally in "Hubby not keen on LC".