[not2late]

The way the book is written, the majority of your carbs should be from vegetables. However, if you follow the book's vegetable recommendations--3 cups of the vegetables in either 3 cups from the salad list or 2 cups from the salad list and 1 cup from the "other list", then you'll probably average about 10 net carbs from vegetables alone. Factor in the cheese carbs (1 carb per ounce), the egg carbs (1 carb per egg), etc. that would probably bring your carb count to about 15 net carbs daily.

Sometime last year, atkins.com revamped their website again and changed the Induction Rules to say that 12-15 net carbs are to come from vegetables and they got rid of the 3 cup rule, allowing a person to eat volume unrestricted from either vegetable list. Now here's the problem with that. 1 cup of lettuce is roughly .5 to 1 net carb. So if you choose to eat 12 carbs of lettuce for your Induction veggie, then you're stuck eating a mountain of lettuce. The problem with that is you don't have any concept of proper portion sizes. Many of us are overweight because we don't know what a "serving" size is. So that doesn't really educate us about food and proper eating.

The other problem with the atkins.com new vegetable rule is that you could choose to eat 15 carbs of tomatoes. Well, tomatoes are higher glycemic index than some of the other vegetables on that list and Dr. Atkins said to be aware that the higher glycemic indes veggies might cause weight loss problems for some people.

Here on ADBB, we follow the book--DANDR 2002 ed. And it says that the majority of your daily carbs should be from veggies and your veggies are limited to 3 cups of the list during Induction. So....that means if you are eating 10 total net carbs, then at least 6 of them should be from vegetables.

The question is why did atkins.com change the veggie rules? Perhaps for the same reason why they now say bread is allowed during Induction---in order to make it more "acceptable" to the low fat dieticians who keep criticizing Atkins due to the fat content of the diet. But they really don't need to do that.

The USDA defines 1 serving of veggies as 1 cup raw veg or 1/2 cup cooked veg and that we should eat 5 servings of veggies daily. So if you use the 2 cups salad/raw + 1 cup other method, then that will be 4 servings---which almost satisfies the USDA's five a day/cooked recommendation. And remember that Dr. Atkins never said that you couldn't eat your veggies cooked or even if you should slice or leave the vegetables whole when you measured them. From my mushroom omelette this morning, I used 1 cup of whole mushrooms. When I sliced them, that one cup whole mushrooms turned into almost 2 cups of sliced mushrooms.