The South Beach Diet Plan kind of sounds like a reality TV show or something, but it actually is a bona fide diet that millions swear by. The South Beach Diet is one of those new breed of diets that sees carbohydrates as the key to weight loss and increased health.
Where the South Beach Diet Plan veers from the similar path taken by the Atkins Diet is in recommending that your servings of meat are leaner. The first two weeks or so require a severe reduction in the amount of carbs, but over time you are increasing it gradually.
In addition, the South Beach Diet Plan divides carbohydrates into good and evil, rather than recommending an across the board cutting back. According to the South Beach Diet Plan, the good carbs are those that contain high fiber as being high in the good kind of fat, as well as having a low glycemic index. This basically just means that these carbs more easily digested and absorbed by the body.
The South Beach Diet Plan is separated into three distinct phases, although it is recommended through all three that ingesting the bad kind of fat be limited.
Phase I lasts two weeks, during which dieters avoid high-glycemic carbohydrates. These include such favorites as candies, bread, and sugar as well as those foods typically much easier to avoid such as potatoes, cereal and grains.
The idea of this two week phase is for the body to reduce its insulin resistance and start using its excess fat. But more on Phase I later.
The question often asked is whether the South Beach Diet Plan qualifies as just another fad diet or does it really have merit. Let's look at the facts. The recommended caloric intake for the average person is from 2,000 to 2,500 calories a day. On the other hand, the caloric ceiling of South Beach Diet Plan is a mere 1500 calories per day. That's not a whole lot of food, in case you were not aware. Cutting that many calories out of your diet per day is almost a guaranteed way of losing weight. But at what price?
One problem faced by many people who try it out is the tension to go right back to their normal eating patterns once the desired weight is lost. Sensing this, the creators have actually done something rather ingenious. They have built the idea of falling off the wagon into the diet. The South Beach Diet Plan creator came up with this idea from personal experience.
He himself fell off the wagon and realized that a diet system needed to be established that deal with that whole whole part of the psychology of dieting. Here, the South Beach Diet Plan is easy enough to get right back into even after falling off track for a few days. Because there are three distinct phases to the diet, at any time things go all wacky, the dieter simply starts over again from phase one, which only lasts two weeks.