Soclbtrfly's Journal, 12 March 2012

Yes....good luck on your Day One. In looking at a few of your food logs, one thing really jumps out at me and that is the number of Atkins bars. They're good and they fill a niche "upon occasion," but they are known stallers of weight loss in susceptible individuals! Sensitive individuals can react to the sugar alcohols in the bars almost as if it were pure sugar. Before considering a fat fast or anything drastic, consider dropping the bars completely and replacing with whole, fresh foods that have NO sugar alcohols. See how that goes. Later, once you're moving down the scale quite nicely, you can test to see if you can handle "some" sugar alcohols. Good luck! 

Thanks Sandy! I know I have been eating to many bars, but they are so good and so easy to grab! I am going to take your advise and cut them out for now. I really have not desire to do the fat fast thing unless absolutely necessary. What is your take on the shakes?  

I did the atkins thing years ago, and one thing I found after re-reading the book and looking around is, all the 'atkins' branded stuff came out waaaaayyyyy after the book and really did not meet the true atkins diet. Like Sandy said, all the sugar alcohols really just fool you. They are 'processed foods', get back to real food and things will go well. Remember shop the outer edge at the store and be able to know what is in your food when you read the label. Another pointer for adkins is be sure to eat real meat, a lot of the branded stuff is processed and filled with 'filler'. I even heard they are doing it to ground beef these days to make it cheaper at check-out. I go to my local butcher and see the cuts before I buy them. 

My take on the shakes is that they too, are OK "upon occasion" but not as a regular, repeating part of one's diet. I confess to having them around right now and having had them occasionally along my journey(although I haven't had one in months). The good news, if you will, is that they have no sugar alcohols. The bad news is that the ingredient list is 2" long!!! Some of the vitamins listed are probably OK, but they also have cellulose gel, salt, cellulose gum, and a lot of ingredients I have NO idea what they are! They have 2 sweeteners in them, listed last. The shake may not be a problem "upon occasion," but if you have a shake, a bar or two, diet soda, sugar free Jello, sugar free this and sugar free that....well....all of a sudden your body is having to handle a whole lot of artificial sweeteners, as well as sugar alcohols......not the best situation. I'm not saying the shakes, and even the bars, don't have a purpose, but esp. in your early stages, the more you can stay away from them, as well as the s/f stuff, the better you'll do. Soulnoid's got it....fresh, REAL, unprocessed food is the way to go. You can always experiment later on....IF you even want to at that point!