Are sugar, ice cream, chip cravings ruling you?  You can solidly end them in 2 days.  End them so you never think about these foods and when given some you are not interested.  Amazing!

South Beach is not a diet as much as it’s common sense, it’s the old way of eating and probably the French way.

South Beach deals with the Glycemic Index and Insulin.  It’s goal is to:

• Recognize sugar in foods and reduce it.  All white foods give a glycemic hit, for example a slice of white bread is the same as a teaspoon of sugar.  Sugar-starch heavy vegetables such as corn and peas do also.
• Even-out the intensity of hits to the pancreas by eating a snack between meals, a bit of low-fat cheese like the yellow Babybel or a string cheese, a few nuts, a hard-boiled egg…
• Slow the bowel for an even system of digestion /insulin using whole wheat foods.  There is a lovely new Oroweat bread called SandwichThins that are basically only the tin top and bottom parts of a bun.  Toasted they are a crispy and make unforgettable sandwiches.  Weight Watchers gives them only 1 point.

My diet was quite good when I reviewed it using Glycemic Index rules (evaluating foods in terms of grams of sugar.)  but what I learned was horrible.  I was actually eating 20 cups of sugar a day and little else.  Breakfast at Swingers in Hollywood was French toast, syrup, whipped cream and strawberries.  Good meal, right? Not drive through, no junk food.  That breakfast was pure sugar and nothing else.  So next time I asked them for seared Ahi tuna, sauté spinach, sliced tomatoes.  Lord but that tasted good.

Eating sugar creates cravings for more sugar.  It’s addictive because the end metabolic chain in metabolism of sugar is the same as whiskey and the same as heroin.

The first stage of South Beach is for two weeks and it fixes this. After the second day all cravings vanish like magic.  This list is for the 3rd stage, the maintainance diet after ideal weight has been reached.  You will see that it’s not restrictive,  just a quite normal old-fashioned way of eating.  You will be deprived of very few things and the cravings never come back.

The first stage of South Beach is basically two weeks of:

• lean meat
• salad vegetables
• whole wheat bread… pile it all together for sandwiches
• low fat milk and cheese for calcium
• eggs
• a small banana a day for potassium
• lots of water

This starts a weight shed that makes one giggle.  Additionally, you feel so very good, like you could fly.  Cravings are gone and thinking about food all the time is gone, gone after the third day. (The old Atkins diet was very different.  It was a starvation ketogenic diet where the body was digesting itself in a sense and hard on the liver.  They have now modified it to follow South Beach rules.)

Filed under: FOOD and DIET, STAY HEALTHY | Comments Off on Stop Cravings