When faced with a chip stuffing relative who told me that 'I'd never do Atkins, that diet will kill you' my retort was 'not before yours kills you'. I felt rather smug at the look on her face.

May you continue your life doing "stupid" things and flinging mashed potatoes - or whatever comes to hand - at anyone who gets in your way!

I can so relate to this! At work they are relentless..but most of the time its "you don't have to lose weight" and I tell them that I FEEL better by eating low carb; And a few times I lashed out and said something about how they eat fried food and cake all day and they're telling me it's not healthy to eat grilled haddock and steamed broccoli! OOh this topic gets me so fired up! People at work ended up apologizing because thye didn't know how 'passionately' I felt about low carb...damn right!

I'm more of a whole foods approach myself. I was a person who was once very against atkins. That was before I started researching it

Now that I know what "real" atkins entails, I DO try and educate people. I don't tell them that I follow some atkins principles - what I do is when I hear someone say "Oh those low carb diets are bad for you" I usually respond with the following:

"Well, I'll tell you what I like about them. They've really started to teach people that refined flour and sugar are extremely bad for you. Prior to atkins, pasta topped with bottled tomato sauce would have been thought to be a very healthy meal. People are now learning how refined carbs affect their systems and how dangerous sugar can be.

People who follow those diets as intended end up avoiding packaged foods, sugar and refined flour. Instead, they eat whole foods and usually increase their vegetable intake substantially. I find it hard to criticize a diet based on whole, REAL foods when the rest of the world is eating packaged, processed garbage on a regular basis"

So in other words, I educate without saying that I'm a part of it

LOL!! I feel your pain!

Also, when you wrote -

It reminded me of just how many people consider Low Carb (any plan that is low carb) only about losing weight. For many who followm the WOE, this is also true.

But the true point behind Low Carb is total health. Inside and out. Anyone can lose a ton of weight and still be morbidly ill inside. That is what drew me to Atkins. I not only had to lose weight, I had to repair my failing health.

Runnr, I love your answer!!! You hit the nail on the head. I too have started explaining my lifestyle in a similar fashion, and again, only when someone asks about it.

Too true. Just today, I had lunch with a friend who said "Losing weight is easy! It's keeping it off that's the problem - that's why LC isn't good for people - that WOE just isn't sustainable." Bringing home, once again, the lessons that: most people get their info about Atkins from the media; even if they bought the book, they never got beyond the chapter on induction; they just truly don't get the point that Atkins is about a lifestyle change to healthy eating.

The main point I tried to make was that Aktins is sustainable as a WOE - in fact, that's the beauty of it., because it's all about maintenance. And the genius of it - induction, OWL, pre-maintenance, maintenance - all carefully designed to actually induce life-long changes in habits and food preferences.