South Beach Diet Summary

I'm done with South Beach now.

Week 2 went like this: Diet, diet, diet, cheat, cheat, diet, get a sore throat, ... lost a few more pounds.

Week 3 went like this: Cough, cough, cough, screw this stupid diet, fruit, fruit, pizza, ... weight stayed the same.

So I started around 196 lbs and got down to about 185 in two weeks. I'm holding steady while battling this sore throat, and I'm blaming Kristen for most of the bad things I eat.

In the end I think the South Beach diet is okay. It certainly works to help you lose a few pounds very quickly, but I don't think it's very healthy to cut so many carbs out of your diet. You end up with a high-fat, high-protein diet which isn't very healthy.

My two main recommendations for anyone who wants to try South Beach are:

1. Take some vitamin pills because you can't eat fruit (though we ate lots of veggies).

2. Make sure you are getting enough sleep.

I think my sore thoat came from a combination of sleep deprivation (I did the diet during the first couple of weeks back to school after x-mas, which is a bad sleeping time for me) and not eating any fruit for 2 weeks.

Oh, and don't get your blood tested during the South Beach diet. My cholesterol reading came back very high. Now that's partly genetic in my case, but I'm sure it has a lot to do with the high-fat, high protein diet. WAY too much cheese, eggs, and meat in that diet.

Co-incidentally, while visiting my parents this weekend, I came across an Andrew Weil book that I gave them a few years ago (Eating Well for Optimal Health). I forgot how much I loved that book. Every page I read yesterday had something interesting.

I was amazed at how similar Weil's 'philosophy of food' was to my own implicit ideas, ... until I realized that most of my ideas about nutrition came directly from this book a few years ago :) Oh yeah.

I also picked up Doug Hofstadter's 'Godel, Escher, Bach' again, so I may have something abstract and confusing to post here soon. I think GEB is an important book to look at from time to time, even if you (like me) only understand it on certain levels. That may actually be the point of the book. I'm not sure.