Interesting thread. :)
I lost 60 lbs between April '12 to April '13 following what I'll describe as a 'slightly basterdized' version of IP.
I joined through an IP clinic in my town, but stayed with them for only 1 week... finished the remainder of the time (and as you can see it took me a year) basically following the IP protocol, but using alternative products.
Being in Canada - and deciding to avoid the customs & shipping fees on orders from Nashua Nutrition and the other American'packet suppliers' that I'd heard of here - I searched for Canadian Cos that would have suitable products; and while I found some, the variety was limited. So I sometimes substituted with things that were 'as good as possible'... but perhaps not totally 100% perfect matches.
It's hard to know whether my weight loss would have been faster if I'd stayed 100% IP-compliant, with 'perfect' packets. My weight loss was pretty slow. Except for the first 2 weeks, I lost about 1 lb/week for most of the time. There were a few weeks in there with a 0 weight loss. But I'm also 62, menopausal, and have yo-yo'd so much over the past 30 years that I didn't anticipate a quick weight loss. For me, allowing myself that little 'wiggle room' of flexibility to use what some here call 'packet hacks'... or other low carb items that weren't 100% ... kept me going and helped me achieve my final goal. I stayed low carb all the way through though, so as far as I'm aware I didn't ever knock myself out of ketosis.
And I also logged all my food/drink daily into
www.fatsecret.com. This really helped give me a daily overview of how my day was shaping up in terms of % of protein/fat/carbs, etc. And how my sodium intake was from day to day. I tried to keep my day's worth of food/drink as close as possible to at least 45% from protein, no more than 30% from fat, and the remainder from carbs. And I checked consistently to ensure my carb intake didn't go over 50g. My daily calorie count was most always between 800-1000.
I'm back for a Re-start, and things are going well. Thankfully, I got myself back under control before I did too much damage with regain, and I intend to stick with my 'roughly equivalent to P1' program until Christmas.
While in maintenance though, I did realize that I can never return to eating carbs or sugars the way I used to. They are a siren song for me, just tempting me to 'more and more'. Ditto ice cream. I think it's important to know what our food triggers are, and if we realize we can't control them then just eliminate them from our eating program. For example, today I bought myself 1 ISO Femme protein bar - just 1 - because I know that they are just too &(#$&! tempting for me to have more of them in my cupboard. Part of me feels foolish and childish for having that weakness - but another part of me feels adult enough to accept that this is the way I am and just acknowledge that for me it's important to just not have more than 1 of them available to me at a time. So I buy one at a time as a treat - and log it into fatsecret.com, checking to see how it's nutrient breakdown affects the overall state of my day's eating plan. (Actually, I'd already done that today, before buying it)
Anyway - sorry this is so long - I like the idea of this thread. And I'll definitely hang out here. Cheers to everyone.
P.S. - Some of you may be interested in my blog - the link is in my signature below. It's focus is on helping those who chose to use alternative products. As I said, I tried to be as close as possible. But I never posted in the 100% thread, because I didn't consider myself 100% IP-compliant.