I'm glad you mentioned your post-meal hunger, because I read about these Atkins frozen meals on a different forum and I'm really interested to find some quick, convenient backup meals. I've found some veggie frozen entrees and ethnic food frozen entrees that have a low carb count (10g-15g for the entire meal) but when I look at the list of ingredients, they contain things like maltodextrin and other hydrolyzed starches. So, even though the overall carb impact would be low enough to manage, I'm concerned about the effect that even small amounts of those starches will have on my insulin response. So I haven't bought any.

Does the Atkins frozen meal that you ate include any of these starches? If so, that would explain your hunger. If there are any starches in the dish, it may have caused you to release more insulin than your typical Atkins meals and, as a result, the lower level of blood sugar that results from increased insulin would make you hungry an hour or so after eating. I would hope that an Atkins brand of frozen meal would not include starches or sugars! But there may be some food chemistry reason that frozen meals typically contain these ingredients. So even an Atkins product might have to use them as part of their manufacturing process. But I have never seen these meals, so I don't know what's in them.

On a separate but related note, I had a day of meetings with students at our student center and I thought that I could just pick up a taco salad from Taco Bell, instead of packing a homemade lunch, but Taco Bell cooks their meat with a substantial amount of flour. Not a little bit -- a significant volume of their taco meat is actually flour and texturized gluten. Apparently, the flour and other starches texturize the meat, keep it juicy, and keep the product fresher for longer periods of time. Bummer...