South Beach Diet, Does It Work?

Everyone has heard of the South Beach Diet. Created by a cardiologist, this diet was originally designed to improve heart health. As a wonderful side effect, it also caused relatively quick and easy weight loss. While it's considered a fad diet or a diet craze by many, a great many people, including health experts, are impressed by the South Beach Diet and its measured approach to eating and weight loss.

Unlike low-fat diets, the South Beach Diet emphasizes healthy, good-for-you fats in the place of saturated fats and trans fats, which we now know are the worst possible type of fats you can eat. Good fats like those found in certain fish and things like olive oil are stressed over other types. These monounsaturated fats are necessary for good health and don't come with the dangerous artery-clogging effects of trans and saturated fats.

The South Beach Diet also isn't necessarily low carb. Instead of just limited carbohydrate intake to a minimal amount like most low carb diets, instead this diet focuses on something called the GI, or Glycemic Index. This index measures how quickly the carbohydrates in certain foods cause blood sugar to rise, and how high it rises.

This is a relatively new approach to carbohydrates and one that's proving beneficial to the many people who've chosen this diet and other GI-based diets. Though you do restrict your carbohydrate intake a great deal during the first couple of weeks of the diet, that's essentially to jump start your progress and get you used to a different way of eating. But then carbs that are lower GI are reintroduced after the 2-week period is over. So technically, this diet is a good carb diet rather than a low carb one.

How does this low GI concept help you lose weight? When you eat a carbohydrate that has a high GI like candy or a piece of cake, the carbohydrates are broken down into sugars very quickly. These sugars hit your bloodstream rapidly. This causes your blood sugar to elevate rapidly and will usually drive it very high. So your body produces insulin and releases it into your bloodstream to remove the sugar.

Because the sugar spiked, the insulin is produced rapidly too, and will often remove too much sugar. This causes your blood sugar to dip lower than it was before, making you feel hungry and even making you crave something sweet. This is believed to be the process that causes junk food cravings, even after you've only eaten junk food not long before. Carbohydrates like those in flour and flour products like bread and pasta absorb quickly. Sugar and sweet foods also absorb very quickly.

Some carbohydrates don't absorb quickly. The sugars and carbs found in fruit and some whole grains like oatmeal, for instance, are released into your bloodstream more slowly. Following the South Beach Diet and eating these lower GI foods helps keep your blood sugar more stable and you avoid the insulin release that causes cravings, fat retention and other health problems.

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