As it's the 1st April I thought I'd give a little run-down of my stats so far.

Days on low-carb: 23
Weight lost: 14.4 lb
Average carbs per day: 9.4g

I am very happy with this result. I actually don't feel hungry so my calories are also naturally down. I can get into jeans I haven't been able to get into all winter. My teenage daughter says my legs look "skinny". I feel awesome. 0.2 off losing 10% of my original body weight.

Low-carb all the way for me from now on.

Congrats on the weight loss. Are you using some formal guide? I try to stay less than 20g of carbs. 9.4 seems very low. Just curious. Glad it's working for you!!

Well I did a little research before I started and I found Atkins 20 which was no good for me as I don't like most veggies. This sub-forum seemed a little quiet so I found a forum for low-carbers and the people there directed me to a thread which follows Atkins 72 - which is the original Atkins plan.

They said basically anything below 20 is fine. Some people are going as low as possible - what they call zero-carbs. Well, unless you ate nothing but plain meat it is impossible to go totally zero carbs, but I'm keeping it as low as possible. Everyone is different. Some people feel ill if they go below 10, but I feel fine - in fact better than fine. My lowest day was 1.3 and the weight is falling off.

Basically I eat cheese, eggs, meat, the lowest-carb sauces I can find to make it a little more tasty, SF jelly, and I drink one single Pepsi Max a day (for the morning caffeine) and the rest of the day drink either water or SF Vimto (a UK brand of fruit squash which has zero carbs).

I have even cut out the caffeine patches. They were doing okay and then one day I didn't notice that one had dropped off until I found it on the kitchen floor. I hadn't felt the lack of it and I wasn't craving. So I decided to go without. This is the third day without a patch and I'm doing okay.

I just track my food on a spreadsheet.

May update.

I was disappointed in April. March had been so good but I was just plodding along in April, barely losing anything, going up and down within the same few pounds. I got a bit low and had a couple of cheat days and had ended up back where I started.

Then I read about a plan called JUDDD - Johnson's Up Day Down Day Diet, where you only eat 500 calories on a down day, and then can eat as much as you like on an up day (without going mad) and you alternate.

So I thought I might try that. I read that one of the problems people have with JUDDD is that they eat too much on an up day, but I thought if I do it in combination with low-carb - so I still only eat low-carb foods, but I just don't bother tracking them - I might be able to keep it under control as it's hard to binge on low-carb foods.

It was bizarre at first, not tracking my low carb foods - I'm so used to writing everything down when I diet. The down days are tough. I eat tons of SF jelly and just have one meal in the evening. But it really worked. The weight started dropping off and I lost 5 pounds in 10 days.

Days on low-carb: 54
Weight lost: 21 lb
Average carbs per day: 7.9g

Current weight: 157.4 lb
Lost in April: 6.6 lb

If I keep losing the way I have been doing, I shall be 130 lb by the middle of July.