The South Beach Diet
The South Beach Diet was created by a cardiologist Arthur Agatston with help from a dietician, Marie Almon. As with most diets created by people in the medical profession, it was designed to improve their patients health. But as a side effect it helped many of his patients with weight loss. The main purpose in the beginning of this program was to prevent heart disease. But in the early 2000’s the word of this program spread quickly and gained popularity as an effective weight loss program.
The South Beach Diet was born from the ineffectiveness of a low-fat diet...Dr. Agatston understood that a low-fat diet would reduce cholesterol and prevent heart disease. But what he found out was that in reality, many of his patients had a very difficult time sticking low fat dieting. To find the answers for this failure--Dr. Agatston turned to the scientific work done by Dr. David J. Jenkins in the early 1980s. Dr. Jenkins is the developer of the glycemic index. And it is here that Dr. Agatston found the answer and the reason why many of his patients failed when it came to using a low-fat diet.
Consuming too many carbohydrates...It had to do with the fact that all carbohydrates end up as blood sugar in the bloodstream. But some are converted much faster than others. When sugar enters the blood stream, the pancreas excretes insulin which triggers cells to absorb it. Many years of introducing quick bursts of sugar would eventually results in the cells becoming resistant to insulin. This resistance would leave sugar in the blood stream longer which would then cause the pancreas to release even more insulin. This excess insulin would eventually drive blood sugar below normal levels. Dr. Jenkins discovered that, in addition to potentially causing diabetes, this effect would also produce cycles of hunger.
Instead of dietary fat patients were consuming too many carbohydrates...Excess carbohydrate consumption led to excess insulin, which led to low blood sugar, which led to hunger pangs, which led to consumption of more sugar. Dr. Agatston assumed that the patients on low-fat diets were eating no less food than they had been before they started the diet. They simply had compensated for the fat by consuming additional sugar and simple carbohydrates (which were rapidly reduced to sugar by the digestion process). This led to the cycles of hunger that Dr. Jenkins described. As a result of this hunger, patients were consuming excess calories and gaining weight. The attempt to reduce the risk of heart disease using a low-fat diet--was actually increasing this risk!
So he turned to the glycemic index...The main principle behind Dr. Agatstons weight loss program is using the glycemic index--like a few other other fad-diets. In other words, it focuses on having you consume food that have a low glycemic index like pasta, pulses and porridge that slowly release sugar into the blood, thus providing a steady supply of energy and leaving you satisfied for longer. Because of this, you get fewer carb cravings, and most important the theory goes, that there is less chance that your body will become resistant to the effects of insulin--and continues to burn fat more efficiently. The diet has three phases, and similar to other low-carb diets, most carbohydrates are banned--to give your body a complete rest from fluctuating blood sugar and very high insulin secretion. It is believed that doing this will help to resolve a build up of insulin resistance.
The South Beach Diet is just another fad diet...We will not go into all the food that this diet suggests that you consume because we consider low glycemic index diets ineffective in the long term! And our advice is to stay away from any diets that make claims that you can lose 13 lbs in the first two weeks. The fact is that almost all of this weight is water and muscle loss, not body fat! This without a doubt is a marketing trick--to sign up more people into their program! The only real difference from The Atkins diet is that The South Beach Diet focuses on food that is low in saturated fat, like chicken fillet, lean red meat, and reduced fat cheeses. It also places more emphasis on monounsaturated fats such as olive oil.
What you can use from this program...In the end we want to say that The South Beach Diet has not really created anything new! It is much healthier than The Atkins Diet, but in the end it is still not a balanced approach--and is mostly focused on short term results. All it has done is shown that consuming too many processed and simple carbohydrates--leads to your body releasing too much insulin, which with time can cause health problems. And this is the only reason we included The South Beach Diet in our Conventional Diets section. But this fact was already known and pointed out by the medical community and used by many other diets. So in our opinion this program is just a money-making program that takes advantage of the fact that people have the desire to lose weight quickly--and without doing exercise! In the next section we will cover The Atkins Diet, which we consider to be the program that you should stay away from. from the south beach diet GO TO.......................THE ATKINS DIET
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