Diet and Health FAQ

Tagged As: south beach diet tip

Question:
Can anyone help me here ?...Is South Beach Diet a good one, and anyone have any tips?

Answer:
My opinion is that the South Beach Diet would be good for someone who doesn't require serious carb restriction. The South Beach Diet author is a cardiologist who is trying to burn the diet candle at both ends. By that I mean his diet allows moderate amounts of low glycemic index carbs while at the same time it restricts saturated fat. It's like a simplified version of the Zone diet. On paper it a great diet, but in practice I believe that it puts people on the edge of a slippery slope in that after the initial strict (lower carb) phase it's too loose with the carbs and too strict with the fat to provide the necessary appetite and craving suppression that is what really makes the low carb diets workable over the long haul. Like the Zone, The South beach Diet is not low carb. It's closer to what is commonly called a 40-30-30 or isocaloric diet. If you look elsewhere in this forum you'll find a thread that has to do with what Will Brink (a reasonably respected author of diet and exercise info) calls his Unified Theory of Nutrition. It states that calorie balance dictates the amount of weight lost while macronutrient profile dictates the composition of the lost weight. Personally, I agree with that. To lose weight one will always have to restrict caloric intake and/or increase activity to lose weight. Diets that are truly low carb have two important things going for them. The weight that is lost has a higher fat to muscle ratio than is had with low fat or isocaloric diets. Secondly, as mentioned earlier, low carb diets tend to suppress appetite and reduce or eliminate cravings.Those two things are very powerful in that they make it possible for people to stay compliant and achieve long term goals. Diets like the Zone and South Beach are what real low carb diets shift toward in their maintenance stages. If you don't have much weight to lose, don't care what the weight you lose is composed of, aren't compulsive when it comes to carbohydrates, and don't have any real concerns about the metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia or any of that, then South Beach is as good a diet as any.