Canadian Personal Finance Blog

I noted last week that Atkins Nutrionals filed for bankruptcy protection. Why would I care, might you ask? Well about 3 years ago, my wife and I read Dr. Atkins book and decided to try the diet out and I ended up losing 85 lbs. (which I have mostly kept off, thankfully). We tried out a lot of the stuff from Atkins Nutritional and mostly found that it was expensive and didn’t really help us that much.

Most of these products were “replacement” items like:

• Lo-carb ketchup
• Lo-carb Pasta
• Lo-carb Bagels (?!??!) (if you read any low carb diet the LAST thing you should eat is a bagel)

etc.,.

We found that eating this stuff wasn’t really doing the diet, because you weren’t doing any kind of change in your lifestyle, you were just substituting one food for another. The other thing we found was that this stuff was FREAKING EXPENSIVE! (hence why I am blathering on about it here). If you follow the diet (not just Atkins, South Beach works too) you don’t need these expensive substitutes!

If you plan on going on a Low Carbohydrate diet, read the Atkins book(s) (or the South BeachDiet) and UNDERSTAND what you are about to do. This is not an “all meat” diet, or “no veggies or fruit” diet or whatever other doom-as ideas you have heard. Don’t get caught up in the HYPE of low carb, but do understand it, and what it is actually doing, and for the love of Pete, don’t just substitute more expensive food, you don’t have to GO BROKE to LOSE WEIGHT!

Do lose the weight however, so you can enjoy the fruits of your Debt Reduction Plans –C8j