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The South Beach Diet

The lastest diet to grab headlines lets you eat anything from salad to cheesecake. iVillage's nutrition expert looks at how the diet works and its three phases.

Leading cardiologist, Dr Arthur Agatston initially created The South Beach Diet (Headline; £10.99) to help prevent heart disease and noticed his patients lost weight on it too. The diet claims to help you achieve your desired weight and stay there. Celebrity followers include Bill and Hilary Clinton.

How the diet works

Good and bad carbohydrates

The three phases of the diet

Eating out

Is it successful?

How the diet works

The plan is based on the principle that certain types of carbohydrates cause people to gain weight. Carbohydrates are allowed on the diet but are put into good and bad categories. Refined foods like biscuits and pasta are classed as the bad.

Good and bad carbohydrates

Dr Agatston proposes that bad carbs make you feel temporarily full by causing your blood sugar levels to rise rapidly. When levels start to decline, you then start to feel lethargic and hungry again.

These bad carbs are also classed as foods with a high glycaemic index (GI). The GI is simply a scientifically valid way of describing how the carbohydrates in individual foods affect blood glucose levels. Food with a high GI contain carbohydrates that have a dramatic effect on blood glucose levels, while food with a low GI contain carbohydrates with much less impact.

The good and bad dichotomy extends to fats, with monounsaturated fats (e.g. from olive and rapeseed oils) being classed as good fats and saturated fats (e.g. from fatty meats and dairy products) as the bad.

So, what does this mean?

The South Beach Diet claims that it is not low in carbs or low in fat, but that weight loss is achieved by learning to eat the right carbs and the right fat.

It advocates a life-long regimen to help you live without the bad carbs and fat. The diet does not require you to measure what you eat in ounces, calories, or anything else. The meals should be of normal size, enough to satisfy your hunger but no more than that.

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