Wow - I am feeling rather harshly judged for driving my child to school. My extremely active, never sits down, plays a ton of sports and keeps all running child.

Not that I need to justify it, but I drive my soon to school because we live up an extremely steep hill about 2 miles from the school, and he has to carry three instruments to school daily - a snare drum, a bells set and a saxophone (along with his backpack in which he hauls home 3-4 large books for homework every night). He could ride the bus - but it only comes to the bottom of our mile long, steep hill - so once I am down at the bottom with he and all of his instruments, I might as well go the extra mile so he doesn't have to haul those puppies on and off of the bus. Yup - pretty abusive of me. I'd say making him carry those three large instruments up and down are hill (and he has to bring them home daily because there is a practice requirement for both band and jazz band) would be more abusive.

Because you are not them. Because you are male. Because you had a certain amount to lose over your lean body mass and not 3x that much. Because . . .

Just don't think of it as, "it worked for me, they must be screwing it up." ;-) Think of it as, "Hot damn I'm fortunate it worked so well for me."


Thank goodness you are not the government. Let me guess: you don't have children, and/or you have a two-parent household, and/or you live in a nice neighborhood.

You don't let your kid walk to school when it's dangerous. When they're 15, maybe. When they're 11, no. Not when there's fast roads and no bike lanes and no sidewalks, not when you know there are three dozen known child felons in the neighborhood, not when there are gangs, not when there's ice on the ground, or it's 110 degrees, or there aren't other kids they can walk with. I grew up walking to school and playing in the neighborhood till the streetlights came on but that is not the world I live in today.

I guess there would be a lot of rural people locked up on this one. If I'd have walked to school as a child, it would have been a heck of a lot longer than 20 minutes, probably most of the day! I don't really think we need the government to micromanage our lives.

Now that my kid has been on LC for 17 days -- minus two she ate with someone else -- her complexion is clear for the first time in eons, she is already getting smaller again, and today when we left the restaurant she SKIPPED out of the restaurant, and then skipped to the car. I was walking behind her with my mouth open, realizing the difference. This is the kid who whines and doesn't feel like doing ANYTHING when we're eating highcarb (and is cranky, bloated, acne prone, brain-fogged and more).

This is the second time I've shifted her to low carb. The first time she lost nearly 5 pants sizes in like 8 weeks. She was back on typical (HC) eating for six months and gained back maybe 1 pants size (plus some in the tummy/upper body). This time she's losing more slowly -- at least to begin -- but she's clearly losing size in several areas, despite she craves more protein than even *I* can eat at a sitting, isn't losing much but is demonstrably getting slimmer all over and I think taller (she'll be 12 in August). She's bouncing around all excited about getting a backyard pool this weekend, and her attitude is much better.

There is no exercise involved here, just a food change, but thanks to the food change, she WANTS to exercise--naturally, spontaneously, because she "feels like moving". That's just the way it works.

Of course, my child does walk to school. He walks down stairs in the morning, and when he's done with breakfast and his chores he walks into the family room and starts his lessons.

Oddly, he seems to be doing quite well in school, even though we are technically poor.

And you don't risk being locked up for driving your kid up the stairs to the living room, either.

Somehow this doesn't surprise me in the least. Atkins diet is wholly and completely validated by Taubes book, yet Atkins himself wrote how the diet doesn't work for everyone. Eades has written about inexplicable variation in rates of weight loss. It is well documented that males lose faster than females, that younger people lose faster than older people, that menopausal women lose slower than all other groups.

Then there is the fact that so many people will criticize research done on a group of 24 while thinking their test group of one person is a model for all humanity.

He claims that I am driving him to develop the speech patterns and accents of Sir David Attenborough, does that count?

Yes. Why would anybody think this is One Size Fits All?

I am glad you don't want me to answer that.

Ah, yes. Thank the gods for rhetorical questions

Only in Connecticut.

Oh Good! We're safe then...

Back on topic, it seems I have lost even more weight since I stopped trying to exercise. I used to love exercise and probably will again once I get to a weight that allows exercise to be fun again.

Exercise is fun?

Let me know what weight that turns out to be and I'll make it my new goal. ;-)

And another interesting fact I learned about runners (I read it in that awesome book, The Brain Trust Project): They tested runners' blood after they ran and apparently, they have the same amount of proteins in their blood that - indicate trauma to the brain - as BOXERS do after their fights!! Yikes! All the sloshing and banging around against the hard skull is not too good for our gray matter!