The ABC of Weight Loss

The South Beach Diet

Former President of the United States, Bill Clinton lost a significant amount of body weight using the South Beach Diet.  This raised awareness of the diet which went on to win fans nationwide, as well as attract its share of criticism.  One thing that we can be certain about is that the diet is highly controversial and is likely to remain so.
The South Beach Diet was created by Dr. Arthur Agatston, a cardiologist in south Florida, who developed his own meal plan specifically for his overweight heart patients. Agatston released his original book in April of 2003 and has since released 2 cookbooks and a food guide.
The diet is a 3-phase plan which sees the user following strict food guidelines. The first phase is the strictest of the three. The dieter must remove a range of foods from their daily diet, including bread, rice, potatoes, pasta, sugar, baked goods, fruit, and alcohol.  Following Phase 1, you can start adding some of the eliminated foods back into your diet.  If you have a significant amount of weight to lose, you might have to stay on Phase 1 for an extended period of time.  However, Phase 1 is far too restrictive to follow for life.
Some have compared South Beach to Atkins, but these comparisons are not very accurate.  Agatston has specifically stated that South Beach is not low-carb.  However, both diets do have a strict two-week introductory period.  Agatston believes in a balance between good carbs and fats, but also believes in eliminating highly-processed foods such as baked goods and soft drinks from one’s diet.  The South Beach diet guru says that decreasing bad carbs will enable you to metabolize what you eat more effectively and will improve insulin resistance which will, in turn, lead to weight loss.
If you are accustomed to low-fat, high-carb diets, the South Beach plan might be particularly difficult for you.   However, Agatston maintains that, over time, you can become accustomed to eating the South Beach way.

 
Supporters of South Beach say that it offers a proven approach to quick weight loss.  They add that they feel healthier and more energetic as a result of following the program.
However, the critics of South Beach are just as passionate and vocal about what they see as the plan’s shortcomings.  They say that the diet represents a one-size-fits-all meal plan that ignores the fact that people are individuals and have differing nutritional requirements.  Critics contend that individuals have differing biochemistries—some people need a high-carb diet with little in the way of grains, while others require a low-carb, high-protein diet.
What needs to be remembered is that when it comes to any diet you need to consider whether or not it is sustainable in the long term. It is all fine and well if you lose weight following a certain eating plan but what usually happens when you stop following the diet is all the weight comes back on. This is because you have not learnt how to change our lifestyle and therefore we just go back to the same bad habits at we had before going on the diet. Obviously, if we go back to all those habits that made us put on the weight before then it stands to reason that we will just put that weight back on again.

The South Beach Diet does provide a wide range if foods once you get past Phase 1, but if you have a lot of weight to lose then you will have to stay on the more restrictive phase for a much longer period. If this seems like a diet you would like to try, give it a go but keep an open mind. There really is very few foods that are actually bad, it’s more the portion sizes we have of them that are bad. If a food is higher in calories then we need to have a smaller portion of it, if it is lower in calories we can have more of it.

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