I decided to get the book from the library and take the recipes that I like rather than buy the book as it is not as well layed out as my Target Female Fat Zone book. Save your money and get her Target FF Zone book – - it’s more bang for your buck and will help you get in shape AND lose weight!

I tried south beach and did lose 30 lbs while on it (which over the course of the holidays was regained), but now finding myself being a single mother of 2 children, I wanted less time consuming recipes with afforable foods that my children would like eatting too, this plan has that.

If you don’t want to or can’t cook all your meals Denise gives you guidelines for substitutions, eatting out, how to maintain once you reach your goal weight. She does suggest you follow her plan as written for the first 28 days but she is reasonable and even advises if there is something you don’t like, have a food allergy, or is simply not to your taste substitute it with another meal from the plan you do like or with a food from the substitution list.

Denise also gives guidelines for exercising which is stressed as key for life long health, steady weight loss, and maintenance.

The only thing that would of made this book better is a shopping list for each week of the plan since she would like you to follow the plan exactly during that time. I understand way she didn’t after the first 28 days you can mix and substitute rendering the lists useless, but it still would of been nice.

That said I would highly recommend this diet to anyone who loves carbs and enjoys cooking healthy tasty meals.

Many of the recipes also require the use of a blender or food processor. That involves extra steps and cleanup.

Also, I was under the impression that whole wheat pastas had a lower GI index than regular pastas, and she doesn’t use these in her recipes.

What I needed was a low GI cookbook with ordinary ingredients and simple recipes.

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.

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.

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!