Category:South Beach Recipes

South Beach Diet


 * Arthur Agatston is a cardiologist based in south Florida, who developed a diet for his overweight patients. With the excellent results of this diet, came the fame and name of the South Beach Diet, a diet that is divided into 3 phases.


 * The first phase includes two weeks of is the hardest, because it is a test of ambition against the urge to feed. As Dr. Agatston put it, “you will turn the hunger switch from on to off in the first two weeks”. For two weeks you will totally eliminate fruit, bread, rice, potatoes, pasta, sugar, alcohol and baked goods from your diet. After this period you are allowed to eat almost every food type, as long as you constantly reduce the foods that cause those hunger cravings (for example if you’re “addicted” to chocolate, you will need to constantly reduce the number of chocolate bars you eat each day, thus cleansing your body).


 * The second phase, allows you to begin eating those off-limits foods again, but never two at a time. For example if you had bread, pasta, potatoes or other high carbohydrate foods in your “don’t touch” corner, you can start adding one of them to your meals. The key here is to re-introduce these foods in moderation and to not eat them as often as you were before.


 * The third phase is the last and the least restrictive of the three. This involves maintaining the healthy habits you developed during the first two phases, while moderating your carbohydrate count. Dr. Agatston says “you’ll even forget you ever were on a diet and what you’ve learned will simply become a way of life”. This is what phase three is all about, trying to develop your body in such a manner that it will never crave for food like it did in your “fat” days.


 * The South Beach diet is a successful diet, which has found its praises in all nutritionist and medical circles around the globe. It involves a good personal ambition and is mostly based on the human being’s psychological factor, not just on complete reduction of bad foods. The reason behind obesity is usually excess for some kind of food (be it hamburgers, ice cream, or other “addictive” foods) and the South Beach diet tries to eliminate these excesses before trying to burn calories, because of the need to develop a healthy, ongoing diet, not just one month of starving with good results, after which the subject will gain his previous weight in no time.