I've been resisting posting on this thread, because once I get started I could go on and on. So I'll try to keep it brief.
The week of Thanksgiving (with the exception of the actual holiday), I started a very low-carb diet. Absolutely no sugar, no wheat (whole or otherwise) or other grains, no potatoes, no fruit except for berries.
At around the same time, I read journalist Gary Taubes'
Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It and found it extremely convincing. It's not a "diet book" in the sense of pitching a specific food plan, with meal suggestions and whatnot. It's a journalistic look (Taubes often writes for the NYT) at the years' of research showing that reducing carbs, which until the 1970s was widely understood to be the best/only way to lose weight, became discredited in favor of the now-prevailing low-fat, calories in/calories out approach, which for various reasons, mostly politics in the medical community, became the mainstream medical position. But in fact, sweets and starches cause bursts of insulin that signal the body to store calories as fat. Stop eating them, your insulin stabilizes, and your body will burn that fat.
He very lays out arguments and presents research linking high-carb and low-fat diets to a lot of medical conditions, including heart disease, cancer, etc. The science gets a little technical, so don't ask me to summarize it all here, but let's just say he has me completely convinced, and at my job I get inundated with diet books and diet press releases and the flaky ones are pretty easy to spot. But Taubes' arguments make logical sense as well. For example, insulin tends to cause fat storage in the stomach -- probably not coincidentally, people with large waistlines relative to hips are more prone to health problems like heart disease and cancer.
I recently read in the newspaper about research in which people who ate a lot of carbs were found to be four times likelier to get Alzheimer's. The finding surprised even the researchers, they said. But it wouldn't surprise Taubes, because Alzheimer's causes are widely linked to cardio problems (I write about Alzheimer's a lot).
So getting back to me: I lost 20 pounds very quickly, at a rate of about two pounds a week. Since then, my weight loss has slowed down to more like a pound a week (I'd like to lose another 12 or so). Fast or slow, I like the direction it's going.
It was tough at the very beginning, but once I adjusted it may be the easiest diet I've ever followed. I literally never have to feel hungry. It's true what they say about carbs -- they create cravings for more carbs, leading to snacking and overeating. Once you stop consuming carbs, you don't really care about them. My sons have cookies and candy around and they don't really tempt me (which they used to). I don't count calories. If I feel like eating, I eat. It has to be something low-carb -- but that includes lots of previously "forbidden" foods like high-fat cheeses, nuts, even butter.
Meal planning is more challenging, especially if you're used to building meals in the Jane Brody way: around pasta, rice, bread, potatoes. But ordering in restaurants is much, much easier: I just pick fish or meat with a salad or a vegetable. It can be as fatty as it wants to be! And it's much easier to tell whether your food contains rice or potatoes than it is to tell, say, how much oil the chef put in your stirfry. And you don't have to worry about how many calories are in it. (Though for a while I did count calories -- i was using the online My Fitness Plan thing -- and I saw that my daily calorie count with a low-carb diet was about the same as the recommended count following MFP's low-cal/low-fat approach. When you cut out carbs, you autmatically drop a big source of calories.)
Most surprising, and encouraging, are the improvements in my mood, energy, mental clarity. Even my lower backaches, which used to plague me constantly, have markedly diminished. These sorts of anecdotes are common among people who adopt low-carb diets, I discovered after doing a fair amount of web research.
Oh, and I haven't been exercising. Not on purpose -- though part of Taubes' argument is that exercise just makes you eat more. My previous main exercise was walking my dog, but I've been lazy because it's winter and I don't like being cold and I don't belong to a gym. The poor dog is getting chubby. But my son has been pressuring me to join Snap Fitness, so I'm probably going to do that, and then if I go a certain number of times each week I can get an insurance discount. And I do think moderate exercise is essential for good health. But not necessarily for weight loss.
I could go on and on. My main point is that I am utterly convinced that low-carb diets, hardly the flaky fad they've been assumed for the past 10 years or so (by myself included!), are seriously the best way to lose weight and be healthy.