resistance can benefit from doing Induction longer because it gives them time to correct metabolic imbalances they may have developed over time. These include insulin resistance, blood-sugar imbalances, carbohydrate addictions and allergies. Once the metabolic imbalances are corrected, weight loss may speed up.
But after all is said and done, to a large degree, your decision to continue Induction or move to OWL will depend on your personality and lifestyle. If you are the type to just go for it and can easily make your life work around the Induction eating program, you may decide to stick with it until you drop some more weight. Another person, who perhaps is under a lot of stress and wants to relax a bit about food choices, might choose to move to the more liberal phase of OWL. This brings us to the last, and ultimately the only, answer that matters. Is a longer period of time until you get to your goal weight the tradeoff you ' re willing to make to have more food choices? It ' s up to you.
The Choice Was Theirs
The two people I am about to introduce you to are good examples of how much individualization is possible in the transition process from Induction to OWL. A high school principal, Dan Wilson was up to 323 pounds on a five-foot ten-inch frame, when he stumbled upon his mother-in-law ' s copy of a previous edition of this book.
In his first two weeks doing Induction-abandoning his usual breakfast of M & M ' s washed down with Mountain Dew-Dan lost 18 pounds. Pleased with his progress, he went immediately to OWL, and within a few weeks he was consuming between 30 and 40 grams of carbs a day.
A former gym teacher, Dan resumed a high level of physical activity and continued to lose weight so easily that after a month he moved into Pre-Maintenance, where he ascertained his Critical Carbohydrate Level for Losing( CCLL) was 80 grams a day, on which he managed to lose 95 pounds in only four months.
If Dan represented the proverbial hare in the old fable, Carol Kitchener could be the tortoise. She held to the 20 grams of carbs permitted during Induction for almost two years. Carol is a nightclub performer, but as she puts it, feathers and sequins notwithstanding, there is nothing beautiful about a size 24 dress. Standing five feet five inches tall, her weight was 274 pounds before she began, and her blood pressure was edging into the danger zone. By her reckoning, she must have tried Weight Watchers twenty-five times. She had never found a weight loss plan that worked for long.
Atkins did. She skimmed off 129 pounds over twenty-four months-approximately 5 pounds a month. Slow but steady. There were a few tortoise-like patches in there, but Carol noticed that even when the scale wasn ' t budging, her dress size kept dropping. Besides, once she realized that she enjoyed the food and was no longer plagued with cravings, she was perfectly willing to let success come at its own pace.
It ' s easy to see how much less metabolic resistance Dan had than Carol, and even easier to understand why they took the paths they did. If Dan had continued Induction, he would have lost his weight so quickly that it would probably have been harder for him to convert to a Lifetime Maintenance plan. If Carol had moved on to OWL, her weight loss would have slowed so radically that she might have given up in despair. It sounds to me like Dan and Carol made the right choices. Certainly they both reached their goal weight and felt enormous satisfaction in doing so.
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