If you have never read a book about healthy eating, you will find The South Beach Diet to be a helpful resource for outlining what we know now about healthy eating. Dr. Agatston is a cardiologist and has made sure that his suggestions will make you more heart healthy. He does a fine job of summarizing what we know about how the body absorbs food and develops healthy and unhealthy reactions. The discussion of insulin resistance syndrome is especially good. In this area, I compared the book to Sugarbusters! and found The South Beach Diet to be more helpful.
If you have read many books on dieting, you will probably be most interested in the idea of dropping all high glycemic foods for two weeks as a way to start a diet.
The book also has reasonable goals for your diet. The key innovation is to get off essentially all high glycemic carbohydrates for two weeks. This helps your body stop having problems with creating too much insulin too frequently. I thought that approach was a fine innovation. Nice job!
The book is less good at providing specific daily diets to follow. The ones in the book look tasty and interesting. They have two drawbacks: Expensive ingredients and lots of preparation time. But they do make the point that you can eat foods that you will enjoy while starting a diet. The book would have benefited from having some daily suggestions that are inexpensive and easier to prepare.
You can, of course, just follow the advice of what foods to avoid and probably get similar results. But that will require more imagination in creating new menus that many dieters may find frustrating.
One of the strengths of the book is that there are lots of recipes from top chefs so you will certainly get a nouvelle cuisine sense of what can be accomplished from the book. I enjoyed reading those recipes. I still haven't figured out what menu I will follow to try this. But some of the menu items will clearly help me.
I liked the extensive advice in the book for how to follow its guidelines while eating in restaurants (including McDonald's).
The book is filled with testimonials of people who have had success with the diet over many years. That was encouraging.
I thought that the book's main scientific weakness was its lack of reference to the many studies cited in Live Right 4 Your Type about how blood type affects the mix of foods that will help you be most fit and healthy. This diet does seem like one, however, that most Type O eaters could have success with . . . unlike many other popular diets.
I had originally avoided the book because I assumed it would be all about how overly thin models who live in South Beach stay that way. That wasn't for me. Actually, the book is more aimed at those who have picked up 30 or more extra pounds and find themselves with a rubber tire where their abs are. In particular, it can be a life saver for those who are starting to become diabetic or have unhealthy signs of developing cardiovascular disease. So it's for the rest of us after all.
I haven't read the newer books that Dr. Agatston has published, and it may be that those provide the missing ingredients in this one. If so, you may need to read more than one to get the most from this diet.
Whether or not you use this diet, I do hope you will learn the lessons here to avoid high glycemic foods, and saturated and trans fats.
Eat delicious foods, look wonderful and feel great!
