Actually...
As I said if you do Atkins correctly your body will no longer store the fat you consume, but rather burn it. Also Atkins at no point advocates totally eliminating carbs from your diet. Instead he has you give up the carbs which have little or no nutritional value (like white breads and pasta).
Before I started I ate really bad. Since then I've eaten more veggies than I ever have. So now when I go and get a steak instead of having the steak and a potato, I have the steak and a salad.
As far as losing more weight by using portion control and exercise goes, please check out this article from WebMD.
WebMD Article
Also, as far as heart disease goes, my grandfather who ate very low fat all his life ended up with diabetes and needing a quad bypass. After talking about his diet with his doctor they felt that it was because he ate a very high carb diet (he's Cuban and pretty much eats black beans and rice, very little meat). His doctor put him on Atkins.
The problem with Atkins is that there are a lot of people out there trying to "do it", without being educated about it. It is a lifestyle change, not a diet first off. If you're going to do it, it's got to be life long. You don't just jump in and stop eating carbs.
I've strong feels about diets as well. They don't work. This is mainly because diets are temporary in nature. You go on the diet, suffer, lose the weight, and then go off it, and utimately gain the weight back. If you change your lifestyle you'll lose the weight and keep it off, but it take disipline.
It's very interesting, my wife and I have both been trying to lose weight. She's doing it by counting calories and I'm on Atkins. She takes in 1400 calories a day and works out quite a bit. I workout twice a week for an hour and eat around 40 grams of carbs a day. We've both been doing this for about 9 months. I've lost 20 some pounds. She's maybe lost 4 pounds. She even more disiplined than I am.
In the end Atkins or portion control or the cabbage soup diet, you have to choose a lifestyle that you can live with. I love Atkins, can eat most of the things I could before and the weight loss and increased energy is worth every bit of pasta I gave up, but the thing about it is: I don't really feel like I've given up anything.
Later.
Naunga