To carb or not to carb

I hate the word diet. I have tried many of them through the years. Most of them have one thing in common and that is starvation. Lots of diets allow you to eat barely enough food to keep a sparrow alive. You starve yourself for anywhere from 1-8 weeks then you go back to "NORMAL" eating. Well if you lose weight there is a good chance that once you return to your normal eating habits that caused you to gain weight in first place it is likely the weight is coming back. Sadly it is also likely that you will gain back more than you lost. This is due to the human famine starvation survival built into our genes. If there is a lack of food our metabolism will slow down to insure we survive and once we start eating our body stores all the calories as fat to prepare for future famine. Our ancestors were hunter-gathers and slowly advanced to herder and farmers. Our diet although omnivorous has always consisted of lots of roots, nuts, and grains. Meat was not to be counted on and considered supplemental. Some of the anti-carb diets such as Atkins recommend that a person eats no carb while others are anti-fat or anti-something else. So far in my research I am leaning towards a balanced approach. There are good carbs, good proteins and good fats. I believe that your diet should be sustainable for a person's lifestyle. It should be a balanced diet with exercise. You should be able to eat foods that are healthy and do so in a manner that you are not starving. This will help your metabolism and give your body the  nutrition(vitamins and minerals) it needs. One of the dangers of extreme diets is lack of nutritional balance. There are many maladies that are caused by nutritional deficiency. British sailors were known as limeys because their diets were supplemented by limes (vitamin C) to stop scurvy. If my research leads me in another direction I will follow it but now I think balanced is best.