South Beach Diet Essay

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The South Beach diet is a commercial diet created by a cardiologist, Doctor Arthur Agatston. Dr. Agatston was a professor at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Florida, where he used the diet for his obese cardiac patients who had trouble staying on a standard low-fat diet. The diet became popular in the 1990’s and was originally referred to as the modified low carbohydrate diet, for it is based on low glycemic index foods but then was renamed for the glamorous area of Miami where Dr. Agatston first started using the diet on his patients at his practice. Dr. Agatston realized the recommendation of the American Heart Association’s low-fat, high carbohydrate diet was not reducing his patient 's weight, but the patients who were using …show more content…
The purpose of the diet is to balance out the foods you eat to encourage weight loss and healthier lifestyles. The diet consists of three phases and the last phase is management which the dieter stays on for life that promotes a healthy lifestyle and uses exercise as a key to managing weight loss. The South Beach diet is based on eating high fiber, low glycemic carbohydrates, and lean protein. The diet consists of three stages, which increases the amount of carbohydrates gradually and lowers the proportions of protein and fat concurrently. The South Beach diet suggests a recommended food list throughout all three phases, consists of three main meals and two snacks per day, and does not limit calorie intake. A glycemic index is a number specified to a particular food that indicates the food’s effect on a person’s blood sugar level, also known as blood glucose. A score of one hundred on the scale would indicate an equivalent amount of pure glucose. The glycemic index represents the complete rise of the person’s blood glucose level after the consumption of food, the height of the rise of the …show more content…
There are many risks when starting a new lifestyle change and it is important to know how to safely introduce your body to new habits. The South Beach diet claims to eliminate body fat, especially in the abdomen area and leave the participant with a new outlook on food and the ability to make healthier choices. Some people should not participate in the first phase of the diet, such as pregnant or nursing mothers because the restrictiveness of this phase, but may safely start on the second phase and then continue on to the third phase. This diet has many strengths, including eliminating refined flour and sugar from the body allowing the body to consume energy differently and insulin levels not to spike and crash. But the restrictiveness of the first phase’s foods may make it more difficult for a person who has an unhealthy relationship with food to be able to immediately cut out that many food products and be successful through the course of the diet. The extreme cut out of carbohydrates may be too intense for the dieter and the high weight loss in phase one can be discouraging for other phases. It is also important to remember that during this first initial phase is that the weight loss that is being experienced is usually water weight from the tissues and not fat itself. Not only is the first phase difficult to initiate and complete through the duration, but it also can leave

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