"Hey Bill! You look like you've lost some weight!" - I've been listening to that big fat lie from my family every Thanksgiving for the past God knows how long! (Thanksgiving is the only time everyone gets together). All the while, every year I was 10 pounds heavier than the year before! Translation: "Hey Bill, I see you are still a big fat tub of %$#&!"

Well, this year it is going to be different! My new "mini-goal" is to continue to lose at least 3 pounds per week. That may seem a bit aggressive but but I've been averaging more than that, (even after discounting my first week on low carb were I lost a lot of water weight), and I think the idea of "no more than 2 pounds a week" should apply to folks who are not as fat as I am.

At any rate, if I can stick to that I figure I can be about ~230 by the time Thanksgiving gets here and I will have gone from ~290 to ~230.

Then the question will be, how shall I react when someone says "Hey Bill! You look like you've lost some weight!"...?

Part of me wants to go there and act like nothing happened, feign ignorance, eat like a pig, then rush home and drink some milk of magnesia

Oh, you've really hit a sore spot for me. I always resisted telling people what I was doing in terms of eating, because I didn't want them judging me when I ate what I wanted!! What a set up!! Many people do suggest sharing, to keep yourself on track. I can't bear the idea of someone knowing that I'm tryingto eat a certain way and watching me fail. What a negative cycle!! So, well, I finally got so sick that people knew. THey all knew. And I was free of the prison I had fabricated. Now I am quite open about it. If someone tries to encourage me to just try eating this or that I just tell them, thank you but I am diabetic and I do my best to avoid medication. Or the like. I am not in danger of failing because I just don't have that option any more. But I think if I hadn't gotten the diagnosis, as I've written elsewhere on this forum, I never would have changed my WOE. Now, when people comment who haven't seen me in a while, I say yes, I worked very hard at it. Thank you for noticing!! All the best for figuring out how YOU will handle it

Bill, it should be very simple. Just tell them you eat real food. If they are curious, "healthy fats, protein, and carbs from vegetables by eating until you're no longer hungry without cutting calories" are all the details you need to provide. Anything else is simply opening up a debate, and there's no debating that you lost weight! I like your goal, and that's a good target for you. Be well.

One thing that might work is giving them so much information about what's working for you that they never dare bring up the subject again.

I did that a lot in my early low carb days, not because I was trying to convert people, but because of my enthusiasm.