Fri Mar 25, 2005 8:50 am   Reply with quote      

I was watching TV the other day and I saw an expose on the Atkins diet on Dateline, 24 Hours, or one of those other news programs and it irked me when they lumped the South Beach Diet in with the Atkins diet and proceeded to take “pot shots” at its validity. Then I was talking to a friend of mine who recently went to the doctor concerning his health and was told that he needed to lose some weight. When he inquired about the South Beach diet, the doctor “poo poo’d” the plan and recommended instead to cut portions and fat. With both of these experiences hitting at about the same time, my quills have become quite bristled and I figured it was time to weigh in on my two cents regarding the South Beach diet.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding regarding the South Beach diet, so let’s get those out of the way first.

1. South Beach is NOT a low carb diet.
2. South Beach is NOT a low fat diet.
3. South Beach is NOT at all like Atkins.
4. Although it’s gained a lot of popularity, I don’t view it as a FAD diet.

So just what IS the South Beach diet? Well, I think Dr. Agatston says it best so I would encourage you to read this excerpt from his book, but to put it in my own words; the South Beach diet was designed by a cardiologist to help his patients eat more healthy and lose weight. The fact that it worked so well and so fast was as much of a surprise to him as it is to those that have tried the diet. Dr. Agatston was compelled to create the diet simply because there was nothing else out there that did the trick. Pritikin is simply too difficult and complex, Atkins is too unhealthy and the food pyramid simply doesn’t work. In fact, the current rise in obesity is directly related to the food pyramid. So Dr. Agatston felt forced to try and come up with a plan that would be easy to follow, allow for and expect setbacks and didn’t require measuring, counting, or tracking what you ate.

Like any cardiologist, he wanted his patients to eat a more balanced and healthy diet to prevent heart disease, but every diet was too hard to follow or its restrictions were too harsh. Some were downright dangerous. Nobody seemed to be able to stick with low-fat regiments for any length of time. And a diet is useless if you can’t stick with it. So the only option seemed to be to try and create something new. He wanted to create something that was easy to follow, allowed for the eventual “falling off of the wagon” and the ability to get back to the diet easily without guilt or penalties.

Read the rest of the article here.

The original copy of the article is found here(mashby.com).