Hi Jeremiah and welcome.
I just checked out your blog and boy, you really DO hide the weight well....or rather you DID. You probably look fab now with your approx. 17 lb. weight loss....not to mention the getting buff at the gym.
Men lose weight SO much faster and SO much easier than women do, as a general rule....due to physiology. Men have more muscle and also do not have the genetic propensity to pad certain areas with fat (for child-bearing, mostly).....and muscle is more efficient at burning calories.
However, I have only one small bone to pick with you.
On your blog, you wrote:
...I liked this idea, because it was more nutrition guidelines rather than a restrictive diet that starves you like those no carb fad diets.
I have lost 55 lbs. on the Atkins diet in approx. 7 months. In addition, I lost 30-something pregnancy lbs. back in the early 90's and maintained the weight loss for 12 years.....until I was put on a medication in 2005 that altered my metabolism and caused a 60 lb. weight gain....so now I've lost almost all of it with Atkins.
And believe me.....this is the ONE and ONLY diet/WOE where I'm not starving/ravenous all the time. For one thing, the mild ketosis decreases your appetite (not to mention increases your energy) but for another, the liberally allowed fat keeps you full much, much longer....and there is no counting of calories....only net carbs (total carbs minus fiber).
The main reason I'm telling you this (even though your plan is clearly working great for you and you should stick to it IMO) is that it is SO common that people think the low-carb Atkins diet is dangerous...esp. when they're not completely informed about what it is. It is NOT all protein...it is NOT dangerous, you are NOT hungry...in fact, are quite the opposite. I eat a totally clean diet on Atkins.
And just as an aside.....low carb is now becoming one of the new, cutting-edge treatments for diabetes...AND not only the recent Mayo clinic studies but all sorts of prior studies are showing that low-fat does NOT prevent heart disease...in fact, quite the opposite....because in this huge push to promote low-fat diets, in order to make the foods still palatable after removing all or most of the fat, they mainly added and increased the sugar, mainly in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (why most of them don't have less calories than the full-fat versions...check the stats on the packages)......which they are now starting to believe is responsible for the huge epidemic of obesity and diabetes in the past few decades.....that carbs are what caused all this obesity....not fat. And in fact...not over-eating either. That it's not over-eating causing obesity but more obesity that causes over-eating.
I encourage people to actually check-out the low-carb diets because in many cases they've heard all sorts of untrue rumors.
deena