"Paula" wrote in message
om...
None of the low carb diets recommend that you eliminate carbs for the
rest of your life.

They still "put a restriction and/or ban food groups". I doubt Aktins lets
you eat an unlimited amount of carbs a day. I also doubt Atkins let you add
four sugar cubes in your morning coffee. So, it's restrictive. And it does
recommend that you continue that restriction for the rest of your life.

You reintroduce carbs into your diet selectively and as long as you
continue to lose the weight you want to lose and keep your cravings at
bay, you can continue to move through the phases of the diet.

You *reintroduce* them *selectively*. This is still a restriction. Control
of your carb intake is going to be monitored by a formula or some kind of
external signal, not by your own feelings. If you *stop* being on Atkins and
resume your old habits, you *will* regain your lost weight. So, you do have
to stay on Atkins for life. The fact that you won't eat the same Atkins on
induction and on the day of your death doesn't change the fact that you're
on it for life.

When it
comes right down to it, Atkins and South Beach are pretty much
diabetic diets. Personally, I'd rather control my carbs BEFORE I get
diabetes than after and the fewer carbs I eat, the less I crave them.

Some diabetics do not control carbs as tightly as Atkins claims
non-diabetics have to. IMHO, loss of weight and exercising does a lot more
against diabete than reducing carbs themselves (especially if we consider
low glycemic carbs). Also, carbs do not trigger diabete, some people will
never get diabete, whatever they do, since they don't have the genetics for
it.
As for the craving relationship, that might be true for you. But there are
other ways to control craving. I still don't know if the control over
craving that some people on Atkins get is a direct effect of the diet, or a
psychological consequence of the tight control its framework provides. And
some people do *not* get good craving control under Atkins, they just stay
the hell away from them, because they would binge if they ate any. I would
not call that good control. I guess you don't really care about how things
work, as long as they work for you anyway.

Eliminating whites - as in
white flour and white sugar - never hurt anyone.

It depends on what you mean by "hurt". Sure, it doesn't hurt anyone's
health.
But if your whole culture uses flour, that means being cut from your
culture, and that can cut like hell (especially if your culture is all that
is holding you together in a foreign land). It also means losing familly
customs, losing things that have been handed down from one generation to the
next. Same with familly culture - if the diet means you can never eat with
your familly again, it does hurt. If you ask an Indian or Japanese never to
eat rice again, you're making his familly life difficult. If the diet means
you will never ever be able to eat food that made you feel good (kid's
memories and all), it does hurt. Sure, you might think it's not a
significant hurt, and that all that matters is health. But how many diets
have been dropped because of that kind of hurt?
To human beings, eating is much more than fueling the body with the right
stuff. It's also a social ritual. And it's also a way of identifying oneself
to one's culture and familly.