Ten Easy Steps to Starting Your Low-Carb Life:

1. Start reading up on low-carb plans to decide which one is best-suited for your lifestyle. Learn how and why your plan works, so when your mother worries about you “losing too much weight” or “not eating healthy”, you know your facts. Get informed!
2. Read success stories, any place you can find them. Look at LOTS of before/after pictures. This will help you start to believe it's possible for YOU. Once you start believing, you're on your way.
3.  In the meantime, begin cleaning out your home of the most difficult offending foods. While your family may whimper for a few days, you're not only helping yourself by doing this, but you're giving them a wonderful gift as well: better health for the entire family! They will get over it. And if they don't, you have more serious issues to address than your eating habits.
4. Work on improving your eating behaviors and your activity levels. Eat more veggies, less sugar and white flour, drink more water, and move around just a bit more. Whatever you can start with that's not too painful for you.
5. Go shopping when you're ready and get everything you will need. Have pre-made snacks on hand for when you're hungry. There is no reason to struggle with temptation when you can plan instead.
6. Visualize success . SEE yourself successful, feel what it feels like in your mind, and start defining yourself as successful for making progress in taking care of yourself. That is a success, you know, and it will take you where you want to go if you nurture that success.
7. DO IT! All the thinking about it, talking about it, reading about it, contemplating it, analyzing it, debating it or dreaming about it does nothing if you don't just do it. There is no right time other than NOW. You don't have to be perfect, don't have to know everything, and you don't have to be without error. You just have to keep going. If you slip, just keep going and ignore it. Just keep going, keep doing it no matter what. That is the secret to success, you know: KEEP ON GOING! Let go of the “how”—really just a veiled excuse to avoid action, insisting on seeing every step of the process in your head before beginning—and move on to merely doing. You take care of today, every day, and the results take care of themselves.
8. Stop counting the minutes! Don't figure out your “end date,” because if you want low-carb to work for you permanently and you want to keep the weight off, you have to incorporate how you eat into your lifestyle. Toss that calendar out the window! Don't compare yourself to others, don't weigh yourself seven times a day, don't set hard and fast (and arbitrary) “must lose by” dates. That's counterproductive. What you're doing when you focus on the speed is two things: 1.) Making yourself feel like a failure when one of your best-case-scenario arbitrary goals doesn't happen; and 2.) Reinforcing the “crash-diet-lose-the-weight-and-go-back-to-eating-normally” mentality. If you go back to eating like you used to, you'll go back to weighing what you used to. You're not on a diet, you're changing how you eat.
9. Ignore setbacks and remain focused on the process. We sometimes use setbacks as excuses to feel bad about ourselves and hop off the wagon into a big vat of cookie dough. Setbacks, slipups, or “cheats” (although I don't care for that word) mean exactly what you DECIDE they mean and nothing more. They can spiral you into days, weeks or months of off-plan eating if you interpret them as a failure—giving yourself even more to recover from and the eating you do then isn't even enjoyable anyway—or setbacks can help you by letting you learn your own body better, your own rhythms, and what tends to lead you off-course. You can decide if it's a help or hindrance to you. There are no mistakes: only learning experiences!
10. Throughout, focus on what you're getting and what you want, not what you're giving up. You'll find shortly that you're not really giving up anything worthwhile anyway. There is no “can't.” You CAN eat anything you want to eat. You can also stay fat. It's your choice, always. The fact of the matter is, though, you get what you focus on. If you focus on the sugar-loaded garbage that you think you miss, you'll end up eating that. If you focus on the fabulous and healthy new you, you'll get that, too.