We have been doing lower carb for a few weeks now. For us the secret is not to cut out all the carbs. For instance for breakfast we'll have a piece of sourdough toast and couple slices of bacon. Lunch will be soup and apple or meat and apple. Dinner is usually meat and salad. Now we still eat a couple of fresh baked cookies in the late evening and have some chocolate after lunch and dinner. (Chocolate is semi-dark chocolate chips or small Halloween size candy bar.) Eat cheese stick and some croutons in late afternoon. This way we are getting some carbs and not depriving ourselves totally. Have also cut out the nightly glass or two of wine. Try to go out during the week and here we do go off the carb thing a bit but again since we do get some carbs everyday we do not go hog wild when we go out (except for the bottle of wine). This is a long term project not the losing the 3 pounds a week thing. Just want to modify our eating habit not make a drastic change. Averaging about 1 to 1.5 pounds a week in loss. When we started we did track calories for a few days and looks like 1500 to 1600 per day for us.

We still do our one night a week meal of Porterhouse steak and baked potato.

To help things along we (namely Cathy) has started to cook big pots of soups and then freeze single helping servings. She also cooks up a whole roast (beef or pork) and/or turkey breast and then cuts that to serving size and freezes the servings. Did buy a vacuum sealer for freezing as this does drastically improve the texture of the meat after serving. The vacuum sealer and freezing serving size portions has made planning meals really easy and has been key for us on changing our eating habits.

So far we are down about 11 to 12 pounds each and it really has not been hard. We have lost a couple of weeks as we totally go out of control when we hit AC with free drinks. But we have held down the carbs when eating.

I really think the secret on the lo-carb diet is moderation. The 1st stages of Atkins or South Beach is almost zero carbs, but that is really to hook you in to rapid weight loss so you can buy more Atkins stuff. What we have decided will take longer but will stand a better chance of being permanent. Also have to remember to be sensible in serving portions as total calories do add up.
So gang that is our story and we are sticking with it. HHH