Perhaps *you* ought to review it.  It's only 1000 calories/day.
Gee, I wonder why people might lose a few pounds on it.

Atkins only recommended it for a few days, but you previously posted
the link to it along with suggesting trying it for weeks.

No, he's on the money. You're smack in the middle of the only
long-term, ongoing low-carb "study" currently available. Welcome to
the monkey house.

And yeah, many low-carbers have been shown to stall if they stay at
Induction levels. Adding carbs restarts their weight loss.

Dawn

Thanks for citing your abundant data.  I have raw counts from boards,
you have not even that.  The ratio of posts reporting 20-gram stalls
to 20-gram continued loss has been about 6-to-1 as far back as I have
counted.  What are your counts?  Given that there is no scientifically
valid data *at all* on either side, you'll have to do better than
calling me an idiot for gathering the only data anyone has.

Here's the deal: I wrote something you didn't like, so you called me
an idiot.  But you didn't offer a bit of data in support of your
stance, while I offered counts that I have made multiple times.  And
there's an even better part about my data: Since my sources are open
to the public, anyone can choose a high traffic discussion source,
start scanning every single post every day, and start doing their own
counts.  My 6-to-1 claim is subject to public examination on either
ASDLC or Escribe and it should be countable on any other high traffic
board.  Start a table of posters.  Everyone who reports week 6+ without
losing since Induction, put them in the stall group.  Everyone who
reports staying at 20 and continuing to lose, put them in the lose
group.  Record the claimed amount to lose on any that mention it.
Anyone who moves on to OWL goes in the third list.  Anyone not yet
to week 6 doesn't go on either list.

But if anyone ever conducts a real randomized scientific study of
what I'm using counts to measure, that study will beat my data.  Any
takers out there in PhD land?  Randomly selected pools.  Control
group not following a plan, Induction group follow only Induction,
Atkins group following the entire process spending a week out of
ketosis to find their CCLL.  More importantly, almost all studies
have been done on obsese people.  My data shows that the 6-to-1
ratio is for folks with under 50 to lose and by the time its folks
with 100+ to lose the ratio approaches 1-to-1.  So it would be
those 3 groups of folks with under 50 to go, and those 3 groups
with over 100 to go.

Oh, you mean the one in the 1993 and 1999 editions with so many problems
it got dropped from the 2002 edition?  Right.  My point exactly.

So where's your data?  It doesn't even have to be scientifically valid
since mine isn't.  But it takes actual data before we can compare
counts.

Good topic.  Let's do that.

Dr A used very poor wording in his books.  He used "loss" and "ketosis"
interchangibly as if they mean the exact same thing.  They don't mean
the exact same thing.  But his process started using ketosis as its
lynchpin in the 1972 edition, he always insisted that the time scale
for "loss" was month to month based on his formal definition of a
stall as 4+ weeks and so on.  So it's reason to take any occurance of
the word "loss" in his books and infer that in the language most use
where loss refers the a new low in a 1-week time frame, you should
really read it as "ketosis".

The fat fast appears in the 1993 and 1999 editions but not in the 2002
edition.  Sometimes he dropped topics from the book just to make room
for new material and sometimes he dropped topics because he learned
they didn't help.  We can't infer simply from it being missing in 2002
that the fat fast was bad, so we need to dig deeper.

In the 1993 and 1999 editions, the fat fast is exclusively to deal with
folks who can't get into ketosis at 20 grams per day.  A very small
fraction of the population has a CCLL of 20 or below, under 1%.  The
fat fast is explicitly for those.  Note the discussion of wording above.

But folks rarely look at what Dr A is attempting to mean when they read
his wording.  They tend to take it as gospel.  As a result you'll see a
constant stream of postings urging folks to try the fat fast.  Any time
someone at 20 stalls, you can reasonably expect at least one such post.
But when you examine the entire list of editions, and when you understand
Dr A's poor writing skills, and you reason it out that he must be refering
to ketosis, using the fat fast to deal with a stall at 20 stops being
what he actually suggested.  This gives a good hint why it was removed
from the 2002 edition.  It is abused far more often than it is properly
used.

Then look at the science underneath the issue.  Three or more weeks at a
low enough carb intake level and T3 hormone levels drop and the BMR falls
with it.  The extra-low carb level is the *cause* of the stall, so
treating the stall with even lower carb levels only exasperates that
situation.  Basic science that Dr A may never have learned since the
studies measuring T3 levels are quite recent.  Basic science that tells
that less is not more no matter how obvious is sounds.  This is a
"explain the event by identifying the cause" argument, one of the best
types available to science and logic.

Overall conclusion - The fat fast only applies in specific circumstances
that rarely apply.  Hence under normal circumstances the Atkins process
never puts anyone below 20 grams per day.  For anyone who ever got into
ketosis at 20 grams, the fat fast is never for them and always an abuse.
(Even though it's technically an abuse it sometimes works fine to bust
a stall.  Shrug.)  The only people the fat fast ever applies to are the
few who never get into ketosis at 20.  For those few their premaintenance
phase is at 20 and their OWL phase is at 15.

Under normal circumstances the Atkins process never puts anyone below 20
for any length of time, so the fat fast isn't a part of the normal Atkins
process.  It is a special purpose debugging detail like the reversal diet.

Taking a survey of popular plans: Atkins, Eades, Heller, Atgaston, not a
single one ever puts anyone under 20 under normal circumstances.  Most
never put anyone even as low as 20, ever.  All have a standard sequence
that has most people well over 20 nearly the entire time spent on that
plan.  Folks, these doctors spent many years developing their plans.  If
going to less and less carbs worked better and better, every single one
of them would do that.  After all, driving carb intake lower and lower is
obvious, so it's clearly something every single one of them tried at some
point.  The fact that every single one of their plans avoids heading
towards zero means heading towards zero doesn't work as well as heading
higher.  They tried the obvious and discovered that the un-obvious works
better.  This is an "argument by appeal to authority".