Why I Quit South Beach
Written: Nov 16 '03 (Updated Jun 18 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Explains how and why the diet works. And it does work- at least short-term.
Cons: Diet requires much planning, hard to stick with long-term.
The Bottom Line: For me, it was very successful as a 10-pound crash diet, but too tough to stick with long-term.
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| tesseract's Full Review: Arthur S. Agatston M.D. - The South Beach Diet: Th... |
The Book:
The Fundamental Theory
It will change the way you think about dieting. Fat is not as bad as we thought it was, and sugar, including starches, is worse than we thought it was. More importantly, Dr. Agatston explains why. The reason is that sugars and simple carbohydrates are so readily metabolized that consuming them causes a large spike in blood sugar, followed by a large spike in blood insulin-- it’s simply more energy than your body can efficiently manage. Once the insulin is secreted, it results in a rapid drop in blood sugar, and you feel hungry again (and possibly weak and shaky) even though it’s only two hours later. Foods that release their energy more slowly, like fats, proteins, and complex carbohydrates (vegetables) cause more gentle, manageable sugar-insulin cycles rather than wild spikes, leaving you feeling fuller on less food.
Some of the things he’s telling us seem so radical it’s hard to know what makes sense anymore. For example, potatoes, white bread and beer are the new triumvirate of evil. (I love potatoes and white bread, so this made me very sad.) Reduced-fat crackers, cookies, puddings, and other sweets are frequently worse than their full-fat cousins because they contain even more simple carbs. The fat in the regular varieties, while it contains more calories, may actually help matters because it helps you feel fuller longer and slows the digestion of the starch so it moderates the sugar-insulin cycle. The plain baked potato, long a staple of dieters everywhere, is one of the worst things you could eat—worse than french fries. Why? the starch in it will be metabolized and gone so quickly that you'll be left starving and reaching for the snacks just a couple of hours later.
The danger is that in this crazy new world, it’s easy to forget that some diet principles never change—you still have to burn more calories than you eat to lose weight. I wish Dr. Agatston would remind his readers of these fundamentals more often. In fact, he devotes so much effort into telling us how to mitigate the damage when cheating that there's a risk some readers might conveniently forget you still should make every effort not to cheat. "Honey, this doctor just said we should put sour cream on our baked potatoes. Load me up!"
The Diet Plan
A lot of people have asked me if South Beach is like Atkins. It's not. As far as I know, Atkins is a low-carb diet, and while it has some superficial similarities, South Beach is much more about eating the right carbs than about simply reducing your carbs. Also, as far as I know, the Atkins plan doesn't care how much fat you consume or whether it's saturated or unsaturated fat. South Beach definitely does care, and you need to keep fat levels moderate and of a heart-healthy type.
Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you already have an idea of how it works. For the first two weeks (Phase 1), all sugars and simple carbs are out, including bread, dairy, fruit, and starchy vegetables. Fresh meat, eggs, beans, and green vegetables are in. Cold cuts, cheese, nuts, and raw vegetables are the snacks of choice. Lean meats and modest amounts of heart-healthy fats, such as olive oil and canola oil, are emphasized. This is the part of the diet that's most similar to Atkins.
For Phase 2, most fruits (except the most sugary ones) come back, as well as whole grains and low-fat dairy products. In theory, you simply stay on this phase until you’ve reached your target weight. If you fall off the wagon, you can revert to Phase 1 for a few days, a week, or even two weeks to get back on track. A friend called it the “no white foods” diet, and she’s pretty much right. You can have 100% whole wheat bread, but not white bread, brown rice, but not white rice, and sweet potatoes, but not white potatoes.
Phase 3 is a fabled beast, and no one I know has ever seen it in the flesh. It exists only in the form of rumor and of course Dr. Agatston’s say-so. This is the far-off day when you reach your ideal weight and you are in a terrific state of cardiac health. Now you can eat whatever you want, but in theory, you will have changed your life for good and you won’t even want that chocolate cake anymore. Ha ha.
Other notes on the book itself
The book can be confusing and vague about what's actually allowed vs. forbidden, so you have to do some interpretation. For example, the food list for Phase 1 says avoid all dairy, but some of the Phase 1 recipes have milk in them. I take this to mean a little milk here and there is OK, but you shouldn’t spend the week having sugar-free lattes. The food list says eggs are OK, but the meal plan has egg substitute everywhere. Apparently this is to humor the many people who have been so indoctrinated against eggs they can’t stand the thought of eating them. The meal plans, recipes, and food lists are riddled with this type of inconsistency.
The book is so filled with shiny happy promo blurbs it's sickening. I agree with LisaJ's husband-- I felt like I was being brainwashed. Very annoying.
The book provides two week sample meal plans for Phase 1 and Phase 2, and a selection of suggested recipes for each phase, including some recipes from prestigious South Beach restaurants.
The Diet Experience:
I have lost weight-- 7 pounds in 2 weeks, which is phenomenal for me, and I did it without exercising, counting calories, using “meal replacement” products, or feeling hungry. Your mileage may vary. I have heard reports of people who lost 15 or more pounds in Phase 1, and then there’s my mom, who only lost 3 pounds. However, she has been consistently losing just over 1 pound a week for 18 weeks and believes she can stick with this diet for as long as it takes, which according to her calculations will be about a year. She has tried nearly every diet under the sun, so I believe her.
Day 1 was pure misery. I "bonked" all day no matter how many approved snacks I ate. Just hunker down and get through it. Managing when you eat is critically important when you don’t have any simple carbs in your diet. If you don’t snack at the proper time and wait until you’re famished for lunch, you’ll end up miserable because your lunch won’t actually get into your blood for a while. Therefore, the good doctor warns us not to skip snacks even if we don’t feel hungry. Easier said than done. Who can choke down celery dipped in hummus when they’re not even hungry?
Does it help you beat food cravings? It depends what you mean by cravings. I’m pretty sure the doctor’s referring to feeling physically hungry. By his definition, my cravings for food generally did diminish. I was shocked at how little I ate and how rarely I felt hungry. I seemed to have no appetite for the food that was allowed, and I frequently only ate half my lunch or dinner. But to me the term “craving” means “I want it,” and my wants did not diminish one bit. Phase 1 did NOT in the least diminish my purely psychological cravings for sweets. The sweet cravings were killing me by the end of the first week, and only daily doses of sugar-free chocolates (not exactly allowed) got me through. Believe me, if you want chocolate cake now, you will still want it at the end of Phase 1, and depriving yourself for two weeks will only make it worse… but you’ll at least be physically full while you drool over the thought of it. The upside is, it’s a little easier to resist when your belly’s not growling.
I tested the sugar-insulin theory the hard way during the first week. I fell off the wagon and ate a SlimFast candy bar (left over from my previous diet, which helped me shed 10 pounds but became too onerous). Sure enough, less than an hour later, I was ferociously hungry (or having a food craving in the doctor’s terms) even though I’d had plenty of dinner earlier. My body had over-reacted to the sugar by flooding my blood with insulin, and I was having a bout of hypoglycemia.
Phase 1 did NOT improve my energy levels, as reported by some reviewers. In fact, my overall energy took a steep nosedive, and a friend doing Atkins reported the same thing. I didn’t exercise because I didn’t have the energy to exercise. Another friend quit without finishing Phase 1 because she plays on a club soccer team and she couldn’t get through a game without some simple carbs.
A lot of the suggested recipes are fairly work-intensive, and I had trouble fitting them into a working lifestyle. Breakfast was particularly tough, since like many women I don’t like to eat first thing in the morning and I usually have my breakfast at work about 8:30 or 9:00 am. I coped by making a week’s worth of mini quiches or frittatas and storing them in the fridge at work. They can be quickly zapped in the microwave or are also perfectly delicious eaten cold. For lunch, get used to salads and sandwiches without the bread.
The upside is that my co-workers were intensely envious of many of my specially made diet foods, and clamored for recipes. Not only is there no need to go hungry, there’s no need to go bland, either. As long as you make liberal use of herbs and spices, aromatic vegetables like onions, garlic, and peppers, simple sauces, and your imagination, you can eat deliciously on this diet. It just takes effort.
It’s been hell on our fridge and dishwasher. The fridge is so packed with produce and leftovers it’s bursting out the door, and we’re running the dishwasher twice as often as we used to, because every meal calls for cooking. In Phase 2, our pantry has also become frighteningly full of health foods-- 9-grain bread, whole wheat pasta, natural peanut butter, all-fruit “jelly.” My rope sandals and chakra stones are on order.
UPDATE
Fast-forward to 4 months later. I've essentially quit South Beach and here's why.
I started the diet on November 1, and I lost roughly 7 pounds in the first two weeks, which was great. I lost 3 pounds in the next 5 weeks. In the 2 months since then I've put two of those pounds back on, and struggled endlessly with those same two pounds, not making any progress.
Why wasn't I making progress? The amount of planning required to stick to the diet when you have a 9-to-5 lifestyle is significant. It's tolerable for 2-3 months if you do it well, but after that it gets old quick. Unless you're willing to eat nothing but salads and sandwiches without the bread (I wasn't), there is very little out there in our fast-food culture that you can eat for lunch, which means you have to prepare your own lunch, day after day, week after week. (The numerous restaurants who are jumping on the Atkins bandwagon don't count- as noted above, they have different requirements, and most of the Atkins offerings are too fatty and loaded with bacon for South Beach.) It's even more true for breakfast. I've had it with spending all of Sunday evening preparing breakfasts AND lunches for the entire week ahead... AND coming home from work and fixing a diet-worthy dinner. I long for the convenience of my SlimFast, when I could just grab a shake and go. Conclusion: Unless you have the time and inclination to cook three meals' worth of food every day (and wash the dishes that requires), this diet is really tough to stick with long-term.
The good news is, South Beach really has changed the way I look at food forever, and many of its principles are portable. I now know how to avoid the type of lunch that will leave me feeling drained and starving come 3 pm, and how to feel fuller longer on less food. I eat certain high glycemic-index foods, such as potatoes, white rice, and white bread, a lot less than I used to. I've replaced a lot of processed foods with "whole" alternatives. I've learned to like brown rice (once I learned to cook it correctly), and love whole wheat pasta, and I've even learned to like multi-grain and rye bread, which I never thought would happen. I've become a big fan of roasting or sauteing vegetables in olive oil. (I'll never steam asparagus again!)
I've also found the concept of "going Phase 1" to be very helpful as a remedy to bad eating habits. By alternating Phase 1 meals with bad meals, I was able to avoid the traditional Christmas weight gain this year, and I was able to use the same technique to avoid actually putting more weight on during my recent struggles. This has become sort of a standard diet technique with me-- whenever I feel disciplined, I eat Phase 1 meals, but I don't "go Phase 1" for a specific period of time. Conclusion: South Beach can be very successful as a short-term or "crash" diet, and its general principles are well worth learning and applying in your everyday life.
I should also note that my mom, who's retired, has time for all this cooking, and only cooks for herself, is still with it and is still losing inches, if not always pounds. She plateaued for a while and went back to Phase 1 for two weeks to jump-start it again, which apparently worked for her. I tried the same technique, but was off Phase 1 again before 3 days were up... I just couldn't go through that again.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
tesseract
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Member: Tesseract
Location: The Fourth Dimension
Reviews written: 71
Trusted by: 19 members
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