I wrote a new post you might enjoy talking about weight loss. Feel free to add your insight. The post is mostly a free association, certainly not the last authoritative statement.

What works for me is by-the-book Atkins – not any of the modified ones. Which boils down to Less Carbs and Sugar. I’m a disabled vet from the first Gulf War and all those oil fires screwed up my lungs, so I have a hard time doing anything more than walking for exercise when I used to play basketball, softball, and all sorts of strenuous cardio – along with not having to worry about what I eat because I had the metabolism to handle it. Now I have to do just the opposite – I can’t do all the fun exercises (even the boring ones) and have to watch what I eat.

The other two issues that are hard for me is time and money. Not being able to eat basically any processed food means you have to buy a lot of fresh stuff and cook it – and it also means more smaller trips to the store because when you’re only feeding one, even freezing can’t save some of the Sam’s Club portions – which also mean it’s more $$$$. With work slowing down, it’s hard to AFFORD to get back on a diet that works for MY body.

It appears that in order to lose the last of the excess weight, I’m just going to have to get used to not eating things that taste sweet. So, the answer to your question is that I have NOT added back sugar in any form to my diet. One of the psychological triggers Dr. Kessler talks about in his book is sweetness itself, although he does not actually address the issue of artificial sweeteners. I have just combined the overall principles he outlined in his book with what I already knew about low-carb (I have a rather large list of books to recommend), and did some personal experiments to see how various things affected me personally. I also plan to write up my own experience in some detail. There might even be my own book in there someday…

The reason for the limited success in my weight loss was that I simply was not able to overcome the nonstop barrage of disinformation coming from both government and the food industry. I knew that most of what I was getting from my gov’t doctor (I’m a veteran) was BS, but I did not realize the extent of it until I read Dr. Kessler’s book, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite ( I just looked up the Amazon ranking: #14! So I’m not the only Kessler fan. http://bit.ly/2ilgc3 ) That is a truly amazing book, and I’m going to have to spend some time writing up a more thorough review on my own blog.

One little experiment that I tried because of the information I got from that book was to stop using artificial sweetener in my coffee. That alone caused my appetite to diminish all out of proportion to the minor change. I then reduced my overall consumption of artificial sweeteners by about 70%, and the scale has started moving down again. Maybe this time I’ll finally dump that last 50 lbs.

Artificial sweeteners weren’t the only culprit I learned about from Dr. Kessler, and I am in the process of experimenting with other variables, and the preliminary results are surprisingly good. It’s amazing to be able to eat a small lunch and feel full — for hours.

But back to the topic at hand, the American Obesity Epidemic is largely the result of disinformation, most of which is coming from the food industry, but much of it is coming from our government. Putting the government in charge of healthcare is guaranteed to make this even worse.

If you want to get a handle on your own weight problem, a good place to start is reading all you can on low-carb, and then getting Dr. Kessler’s book for information on how to actually make it work.