I've lost 66 pounds and dropped more than a dozen inches around my waist, and people have noticed. Even people who have managed to resist asking me questions before this week have finally start to quiz me for details now that I've begun wearing better-fitting clothes! I've had to come up with a set of recommendations and advice.

What I Recommend

I'm not a doctor, nor a nutritionist, nor your mother. The advice I would give now — if I were giving advice — would be slightly different from the advice I took when I started. Over the last 17 weeks I've learned some things and had a chance to try different approaches, and from my new lighter perspective I tend to be more relaxed about things than I was in the beginning. I was desperate then.

Looking back, the best way to describe the path I've followed to lose 66 pounds in four months is simply this: Atkins done faithfully. I've seen many people take the over-simplified idea from the original Atkins plan that you can eat all the protein and fat you want so long as you keep the carbohydrates low to stay in ketosis. There is some truth to that, but it will inevitably leads to slower weight loss and even rapid weight gain once you exit ketosis.

Face it: if you're a large person, like I was, the real problem is probably that you eat too much. If you're like me, the problem is even worse, because I was honestly convinced I didn't eat too much, but was paying the price for past bad eating habits. Looking back now, I realize that I was still eating too much. Maybe you're different. Maybe it's glandular. I'm still not a doctor, so I don't know. In my admittedly amateur observation, people my former size and larger tend to eat too much.

Any plan that includes "eat all you want" seems like a recipe for long-term disaster. Unless that sentence ends with "... then run two marathons a day," you're probably going to end up taking in more calories than your body uses, and where are those calories supposed to go? Long-term success depends on establishing a lifestyle in which the number of calories you consume is right in line (while losing weight, slightly less) with the number of calories you burn. Removing the bun (and the single slice of cheese stuck to the bun) from a Jack in the Box Ultimate Breakfast Sandwich cuts the carbs and the calories. Ordering a second Ultimate Breakfast Sandwich to make up for that is just a bad idea. You might still lose weight now, thanks to the ketogenic effect, but what's going to happen when you eventually go back to eating the bun? If you're still eating two sandwiches, you're likely to gain weight quickly!