agree that low carb diets suck, I tried it once and I regret it. I have never been one to have issues with food. I dont get cravings, I can pass on desert, no problem. Dont have an addictive personality at all. No issues with food at all. Never understood the problems the people have sticking to diets. I thought they were undisiplined and cry babies.
Then I decided to do the Atkins thing, first 'diet' in my life, big mistake. I cut out a lot of carbs and next thing you know I was craving chocolate cake out of the blue, and I never even ate it much before. I thought I was going crazy. I became obsessed with carbs. My cravings were getting in the way of my day, I couldn't think straight. For the first time I understood what it meant to be addicted to something. I felt sorry for all the people that live with cravings, food or anything else. It was just awful. And the worst part is when I went back to a normal diet I still had the cravings. Its been a year now and I am finally getting back to normal. The diet screwed me up and I will never do any kind of specific type dieting where one food is left out. Once you fuck with your body like that it is hard to get back to normal.
If you want to lose weight fast than I feel there is no better diet than low carbs. I have personally eaten low carb (lean meats and protein sources, vegetables, and very little nuts and blueberries) and dropped 20 something pounds in a month.
The benefit of this diet was being able to eat until full thanks to the vegetables, but the cravings for carb foods eventually wears you down and makes you give in.
TA's diet would likely make you stop eating without getting full at all. It would be difficult to stop after 1 cheeseburger or a 1/4 cup of ice cream meal after meal.
I believe the best diet would be a combination of the two. Try to eat only lean protein sources, vegetables, fruits, etc and when you do have the strong cravings to go out and have one quarterpounder or a 1/2 cup of ice cream or something. Or allow yourself 6 servings (could be any number) of low calorie, unhealthy, carb meals like a quarterpounder a week and not go over this number - kind of like the weight watcher point system, but you only have to keep track of the number of cheat meals and not everything you eat.
The keys to this diet are to make sure your healthy meals are truly healthy and to make sure your cheat meals don't go over 500 calories or some arbitrary self chosen caloric limit.
If you eat healthy 80 to 90 percent of the time you will probably be healthy. Unhealthy people eat unhealthy meals 90% of the time and usually have other destructive vices like alcohol and cigerettes and the like.
the problem with most dieters and bodybuilders and myself included is that we tend to take things to extremes. If we are dieting then gosh darn it we ain't going to eat a single bad food and not going over 2000 calories and this is a setup for failure.