Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(19)
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2 star:		(1)
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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!

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.

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.

Convinced that low carb diets are the answer for me, but confused about why my diet has frequent stalls, I purchased Laura Richard's book. This book summarizes several versions of the low-carb diet, without subjectivity. Richard creates a nice comparison chart of the most common low carb diets. She offers great advice on how to prevent and get through stalls and various support resources for low carb dieters. A MUST read for low carb dieters or those who can't decide on a low carb program. The only downfall is small print..

If you are a lo-carb convert and are looking for a way to make this way of eating a lifestyle, I highly recommend you read this book. It is particularly helpful in diagnosing stalls in weight loss, many of which are subtle but can pose a barrier to success. Before reading this book I had the big picture. Now I have the find points and can see that Lo-carb is not just about losing weight but gaining health.

I have been doing a low carb diet for a long time, but I learned a lot from this book anyway. It is so full of tips on how to do low carb dieting better, that I will be trying them for a long time to come. I wish I had this book when I was first starting the diet because I think I would not have made as many mistakes. I spent a lot of money buying a bunch of low carb books trying to figure the diet out and I wish I would have had this book first. I think it would have saved a lot of time and money because it is all in this book.

So many people have written such nice things about this book that I feel compelled to write a negative review. But I can't. This book was very useful. If you are thinking of starting a low carb diet but are not sure which one, start by reading this book. It compares the various diets in an unbiased, down-to-Earth way. For me, the most important part of this book was the chapter which discussed the various factors which can cause the low carb diet to suddenly stop working for no clear reason. Many of the causes of slowing weight loss are not obvious. This book will likely help you find the cause of your slowed weight loss and help you get back on track. And on top of that, the book is so cheap. You are hurting yourself if you don't add this book to your low carb arsenal.

The author has done a great job of introducing low-carb dieting in all its different forms. She begins by listing the points that all the low-carb book authors agree upon. Then she provides encapsulated summaries of the most popular low-carb diet plans, defining the focus of each and highlighting what people liked most about each plan and what they liked least.

This is not a low-carb diet book in and of itself; it simply gives hints on how to make whatever diet you have chosen to follow work better for you. And unlike most of the diet book authors this author lays it out straight as to what the dieter can expect, including the negative aspects of stalls and plateaus. I liked the balanced treatment of the various low-carb diets.

She even goes into some detail on nutrition labels and how to identify hidden carbs. She did, however, use a faulty premise in her explanation of how to locate hidden carbs based on nutrition labels, and I didn't like the fact that she lumped sugar alcohols in with real sugar. But these are trivial annoyances and should not cause anyone to go astray on their diets.

Overall, it is a good read for anyone considering a low-carb lifestyle, or for those who might be experiencing problems on their diet.

I have been low carbing for about 2 months and I was having mixed results before I read this book. The first chapter that compares all the different plans helped me select a plan that was much better for me than the one I was on originally. This book also helped me discover 2 important things that I was doing that slowed my weight loss. The combination of choosing another plan and tossing out my stallers, my weight loss sped up a great deal. Absolutely worth the $7.00 I paid for it.

This book answers probably all of the questions about low-carb diets that the original books (Atkins, Schwarzbein, Carbohydrate Addicts) do not answer. In fact, this would be a good book to buy BEFORE you go on a specific low-carb plan.