The South Beach Diet

What is the South Beach Diet?

They may seem similar, but The South Beach Diet is more than just a heart-friendly version of the Atkins diet. All the same, they do have a lot in common.

Both South Beach and Atkins diets are the creation of doctors. The father of The South Beach Diet is cardiologist Dr Arthur Agatston, director of the Mount Sinai Cardiac Prevention Centre in Miami Beach, Florida in the US.

Only someone living in a cave hasn't, by now, heard of Agatston's The South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor-Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss. It came to prominence in the early 2000s.

The South Beach Diet restricts carbohydrates - carbs, as diet dilettantes like to say. True, "good carbs" are allowed, but South Beach dieters must say goodbye to potatoes, fruit, bread, cereal, rice, pasta, beetroot, carrots and sweet corn for the first two weeks. After that, most of these foods remain strongly discouraged.

The South Beach Diet has a severe induction phase, followed by a long-term eating plan.

The difference between the South Beach and Atkins diets, really, boils down to two things:

• Fats. The South Beach Diet bans unhealthy fats but strongly promotes healthy ones.
• Carbs. The South Beach Diet doesn't count grams of carbs. The Atkins diet seeks to change a person from a sugar-burning machine into a fat-burning machine. The South Beach diet looks at how much sugar is in a carb. Low-sugar carbs -- those with a low glycaemic index (they don't cause the blood sugar levels to rise and fall as quickly) -- are good (this point may sound very familiar to fans of the Sugar Busters diet).

As Dr Agatston says, this means his diet is not - exactly - a low-carb diet or a low-fat diet

What you can eat on the South Beach Diet

You won't go hungry on the South Beach Diet. In fact, like the Body-For-Life diet, the South Beach Diet promotes strategic snacking. You're not doing it right if you don't snack.

There's no counting calories or strict portion sizes, but there's no gorging either. The idea is to eat normal portions. To many of us, normal portions will seem small at first. They are enough to satisfy hunger, but no more.

As noted above, sugar-rich carbs are off the menu. These include rice and potatoes, and vegetables -- such as beets and sweet corn -- with high sugar content. Also, there are no pastries or other sugar-filled desserts. Alcohol is forbidden in the induction phase and limited in the long-term diet.

What's on the menu? There are three phases.

The 14-day induction phase bans bread, rice, potatoes, pasta, baked goods and fruit. You can't have even a drop of beer, wine or other alcohol. The diet promises that after a couple of days, you really won't miss this stuff. As for dairy, two servings of semi-skimmed or skimmed milk, or low-fat yoghurt are now allowed during this phase.