Losing weight is the second hardest thing I ask my patients to do.  (Quitting smoking is the hardest.)  Typically, physicians have generally recommended a low-fat diet which is still the diet recommended by national guidelines.  Despite this, several different kinds of diets have become popular recently with varying amounts of carbohydrates, most notably the Atkins diet which is very low in carbohydrates and very high in fat. This week's Journal of the American Medical Association cont...