The Secret To Low Carb Success!: How to Get the Most Out of Your Low Carbohydrate Diet [Paperback]

Laura Richard (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Kensington (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1575668955
• ISBN-13: 978-1575668956
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #886,161 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

259 of 261 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tweaker's Best Friend, April 21, 2002

By 

Karen Rysavy "Low-Carb Diva since 2000" (Colorado, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Secret To Low Carb Success!: How to Get the Most Out of Your Low Carbohydrate Diet (Paperback)

This book is an excellent compilation of all the best advice gleaned from the author's own low carb dieting experience, as well as online resources. Ms. Richard has a witty and entertaining style of writing, which makes this book a genuine pleasure to read. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone on a low carb diet who does not have access to the Internet, or who does not have the time or patience to weed through millions of posts on Internet support boards in order to find those few pearls of wisdom that are always hiding among a proliferation of other posts.

This book includes a brief individual summary of each of the following low carb plans:
the Atkins diet
the Carbohydrate Addict's Diet
the Zone
Sugar Busters!
Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution
Protein Power
The Schwarzbein Principle
Neanderthin
Thin forGood

The Secret to Low Carb Success also provides this summary in the form of a chart, allowing you to compare all of the plans side-by-side. You can reference subjects like caffeine on another comparison chart and see what each of the individual author's opinions is on a given subject.

One of the most helpful sections of this book and will no doubt be Chapter 2, "Know What to Expect." This is where you get the real nitty-gritty -- the lowdown on how much weight you can really expect to lose on a typical low carbohydrate plan, the definition of a true stall and plateau versus the typical periods of slow or no loss that plague all of us, and a discussion of "whooshes" as well as "set points" and "natural body weights" that are difficult to move beyond. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of how muscle growth masks fat loss, and how, as we all know, "scales are for fish".

The book goes on to discuss how water retention masks fat loss. She explains it very well: since a pint is a pound the world around, the weight of the water that we drink and retain fluctuates daily.

Another very valuable section has been devoted to the subject of hidden carbs. Very few of the official diet plan books even touch upon this so-important subject. This book includes images of actual nutritional labels, and it drives this important point home very well.

The author has cleverly combined the advice of many successful dieters into one easy-to-read narrative. Bravo, Laura Richard!

123 of 124 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you're going to read only one low carb book, this is it., February 22, 2003

By 

Dan Bobinski (Boise, Idaho) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Secret To Low Carb Success!: How to Get the Most Out of Your Low Carbohydrate Diet (Paperback)

A few years ago I lost a fair amount of weight going low carb, but due to not knowing much about eating LC, I was inadvertently cheating the diet. My weight loss stopped, I became disillusioned, and went back to my old ways of eating. This past fall my doctor instructed me to go on a low carb diet (he had lost 35 lbs on LC eating). He was serious: My weight was affecting my health.

I decided to do as much learning as I could about the LC lifestyle -- it gets a lot of criticism in the medical community, and with my wife and several friends in the medical field, I figured I better get as many medical perspectives as I could in order to dialog intelligently on the subject.

The gold mine was struck when I came across Laura Richard's book. Laura Richard is a registered nurse -- that's the 4-year degree-type -- and she also holds a master's degree in healthcare administration. She no dummy when it comes to the medical field. This is what impressed me first: Her Credibility.

I bought the book for what seemed like too low a price (it's way inexpensive), and dug in. I was immediately impressed with Richard's organization of the subject matter. Not much rambling in this book, but it's not a dry read in any way. Quite the contrary. What makes this book so appealing is a genuine, down-to-earth writing style. It captures you and you want to keep reading. She uses easy-to-understand analogies to explain difficult concepts. I don't see how anyone could not understand the material she presents.

As has been previously posted in reviews of this book, Laura Richard does a fine job of consolidating what was no doubt hundreds of hours participating on Internet message boards and discussion groups. She includes a "voice of low carb experience" section at the end of most topical discussions. In other words, not only does she do a great job of outlining various "expert" opinions with a fair and balanced approach, she ties it all together with a dose of reality expressed by hundreds of others from her experience participating in discussion groups.

This book is both a primer and a bible for low carbers (and for those who want to support their LC family and friends). In addition to the well-organized contrast and compare section on all the LC diet philosophies and all the great tips and education throughout the book, Richard includes a fairly comprehensive resource section at the back of the book -- which I've found quite helpful. Even as good as this book is, it obviously can't cover everything, so joining a low carb forum online is helping to "fill in a few gaps" in my learning. I probably wouldn't have joined such a group on my own, but as Richard has shown, "the voice of low carb experience" can be quite helpful at times.

In essence, this book is not only informational, it's transformational. If you could only have one book to explain the whys and wherefores of the LC lifestyle, this should be it. I've read it twice, and it's one of the few that's going onto my "read it every year" bookshelf. I'd pay ten times the cover price for the wealth of information this book presents.

Five Stars. Excellent. Highly Recommended. Easy Read. You won't want to put it down.

95 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is excellent, February 7, 2002

By 

Jean Joyner (Omaha, NE) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secret To Low Carb Success!: How to Get the Most Out of Your Low Carbohydrate Diet (Paperback)

I think that this book is great for new low carb dieters and those who are having troubles with the diet (I fall in the later category, unfortunately). The author says that she took the best advice on how to speed up weight loss from several Internet low carb newsgroups and put it all together in this book. She must have spent alot of time talking to low carb dieters, because this book goes to the heart of nearly everything that I wanted to know. She presents it in a direct way but she is very supportive and encouraging at the same time. My husband (another low carb dieter) thinks it is great, too. For the first week that we had it, we argued each evening about who would get to read it first. I have underlined nearly every paragraph in the chapter on stumbling blocks. I got it only two weeks ago, but it is already dog-eared.