Rating: 
Summary: Sensible, but hardly enough material for an entire book
Review: I bought this to help take off a few pounds and to give to a friend who has high cholesterol, and I do think that the information on eating healthy fats, and avoiding sugar and refined carbohydrates is worthwhile reading. But there sure as heck isn't anough information in this "book" to justify calling it that. Only pages 3-107 cover information related to the author's theories of nutrition and weight loss, and those pages are VERY repetitive, plus they are liberally sprinkled with testimonials and half-blank pages. (Hey, when I was guilty of that kind of padding in some of my college papers, the professors called me on it.) The vast majority of the book, pages 108-294, consists of menu plans and recipes, which are pretty superfluous once you understand the book's underlying principles. The net useful information in this book could be summarized in a short article. That being said, the book did motivate me to eat more healthfully (and I'm hoping it will have that effect on my friend), so don't regret the purchase.
Rating: 
Summary: Shedding pounds the easy way, YEAH RIGHT!!!!
Review: Look people, To lose weight is simple. The only effective and inexpensive way to lose weight is to eat less and work out more. Diets are apart of our societies "I want it NOW not later and heaven forbid it, if hard work is required!!" mentality. I dont care if your obese or just plain overweight you can lose weight if you work out at least 4 days a week(at least 45 min of cardio), watch your fat intake and drink more water. Keep this up for 12 weeks and you will have lost more weight then you could have imagined. The one flaw with the above is that it requires will power and diets feed on your lack of will power to survive. good luck!
Rating: 
Summary: Dr. Agatston is not an author, but the diet works!
Review: I certainly didn't pick this book up for a good read, I picked it up for the diet advice...and it delivers. I basically skimmed through the paragraphs and found the charts, tables, menus, and recipes very helpful. I needed to limit the amount of carbs I was consuming, but didn't want all of the high-fat meats (I'm a vegetarian) replacing them. This book offers great fish recipes inside. I don't understand the people complaining because the recipes are too difficult...that only those in South Beach with a chef can prepare them!? If you've lived your life getting meals from a drive-thru window, you might find the meal preparation difficult, otherwise the recipes are simple and easy to follow. I live in a metropolitan area so the ingredients are easy to find (any higher-end grocery store will carry all of them). I have, however, lived temporarily in other parts of the country, and I found that shopping for certain foods was more difficult. I'm sure you can easily substitute some of the herbs or fish that the recipes call for. Basically, I love carbs and this diet has helped me limit them. I was looking to get rid of a few extra pounds that I gained this summer, and this diet was a miracle!
Rating: 
Summary: Not too good to be true
Review: I tried Atkins, WeightWatchers and everything in between on and off for 7 years...lose some,gain more.It all started with menopause. Most of my life my weight stayed between 104 and 114. Suddenly (it seems) I weighed 167 lbs. This makes for a very unhappy 56 year old!
This diet is different. Yes, probably the first several pounds is water loss but it does the ego good. Stick with it and by the third and fourth week you really don't feel hungry and more often than not don't finish what is on your plate or what your allowed for the day. It gets very slow so it's imperative to keep looking at everything you put in your mouth and ask the question? Will this turn into sugar as soon as it gets in my mouth? This visual is very helpful! The book teaches you a lot about nutrition and should be read - don't just pick out the diet itself. The receipes are VERY tasty and families will enjoy them too. Good job Doc!
A Maryland Reader!
Rating:
Summary: Hungry no more
Review: I highly recommend this book! As a researcher, I am usually very critical of the claims made by popular diet books. I've read most of the current contenders - Atkins, Zone, Carbohydrate Addicts. Each of these only gave selected aspects of the current research, and even made claims that are contradicted by well-conducted studies. South Beach Diet is the only one I've read that draws from all the most up-to-date findings in an unbiased way. (I've read the research in the scientific journals myself.) And - the diet works! My husband and I have both lost considerable weight without being hungry. (In only a week, people who didn't know we were on a diet were asking us if we had lost weight.) That's especially impressive given that it is extremely hard for me to lose weight. I've spent the last 10 years of my life being hungry most of the time and learned to ignore it just to keep from gaining weight. I went on this diet and stopped being hungry!!! My energy level has improved. The diet is well-balanced, healthy, and do-able. Contrary to what some have said, it is not low-carbohydrate. Rather, it promotes eating the right carbohydrates (sorely lacking in the typical American diet), the right proteins, and the right fats. We've been eating beans every day (including the first 2 weeks), and are now eating barley, oats, and other whole grains, whole-wheat pasta, fruit, etc. We're also enjoying nuts, avocados, and olives (foods I used to think were fattening). This is a way of eating you can truly live with.
Rating:
Summary: Informative, but incomplete
Review: I've been on the South Beach Diet for 5 days now, and have actualy lost 7 pounds. I'm not kidding myself into believing that the loss is all fat (probably mostly water weight). However, it is encouraging just to see the scale a little lower. Anyone who has tried to lose weight will agree: quick results, even if they are only for the initial phase, really improve your atitude about sticking to a healthy eating plan.
The South Beach Diet (very gimmicky name) is a great inroduction to nutritious eating for people who want to lose weight. It teaches you about good carbs/bad carbs and the GI approach to weight loss (which has been well known for many years). Anyone who has the intelligence of an eggplant (or greater) should be able to follow this eating plan if they actually stop and think about how the diet is helping them to lose weight, and adjust their food options/intake accordingly.
My primary beefs with the book is: 1. Its extremely gimmicky/infomercial writing style and 2. Its incomplete approach to nutrition. The book never really goes very deep into how unsaturated fats are healthier than saturated, why certain vitamins are good and where we can find them in foods we eat, good vs bad cholesterol, etc...
However, there are plenty of books out there on that subject, and I would recommend anyone who has decided to follow the info in this book to go out and purchase a nutrition book as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Diets dont work!
Review: People don't seem to get it. Diets don't work. Eat less and exercise and you won't be fat. But people want to ear Happy Meals sitting down. It won't work. Of course, people will always buy diet book and never exercise.
Rating:
Summary: I have made up my mind: no way am I doing this
Review: After reading reviews of this book in which people describe becoming constipated,dizzy,listless or even fatter, I have decided not to follow the plan. (That and one has to read 110 pages before finding the meal plans)
The one good thing? I've discovered a good h'ors douvres recipe(the vegetable quiche cups) as well as a new way to make spinach.
Rating:
Summary: Please Find An Editor.....
Review: The diet might be okay but the writing, editing and overall care to detail in this book is terrible. I'm not the dieting type but my wife wanted to try this so I went on it too. I normally lose weight quickly when I stop eating junk foods so did drop about 12 lbs in the 2 week period. So it's not a bad diet and easy to live with. Phase 2 is really just adjusting back to normal so it's not too bad. I found quickly that I just ignored his menus and receipes and substituted my own. So as a diet it's okay but only if you've reached that point that you want to change. I give it credit for helping me eliminate the need for carbohydrates. I don't crave bread, rice or potatoes. I did miss nachoes with salsa so added baked one back into my diet. What makes this book hard to accept is just the bad writing, type setting and editing. Two major points: Excessive words. I notice this because I write like this. I know I need someone to reread my writing. Dr. Agatston does too. For example on pg.67 one paragraph starts... "If we eat white bread, we're getting no fiber with our carbs. That's like drinking on an empty stomach:" (Skip ahead 2 sentences and he says "Eating white bread is analogous to drinking alcohol on an empty stomach;" Duh!. Did he think we forgot his first statement in the intervening 55 words? This repeating of content is frequent. Flow of narrative. There are sections that just don't flow well. For example on pg. 64 he's talking about Carb's Competitors. He gives a quick summary "The reason is simple...slower digestion of carbs, less insulin. Less insulin, less dramatic drop in blood sugar. Less of a sugar rise and fall now, less hunger later." The only problem is that he has not yet described the role of insulin up to this point. So the reader, if ignorant of insulin and blood sugar, doesn't have a clue what he means. It's on the very next page in the section on "The Body's Response" that he describes the role of insulin. Let me go back to pg. 64 and the section on Carb's Competitors. Besides the insulin example mentioned above, this 3 paragraph section is a good example of the bad writing style. First off, "Carb's Competitors" is the section subtitle. It is spelt wrong. Competitors is spelt "Competitiors". I thought maybe this is some alternate spelling but I checked both my Oxford and Webster dictionaries and this is just an incorrect spelling. And it is in a bold subtitle heading. So this is the section subtitle. But what does it mean? In this section he describes those qualities of food that slows the absorption of carbohydrates. But those are not competitors. To me a competitor is something that attacks or counteracts or competes with carbohydrates - that is not what he is talking about. The first sentence is "Which substances get in our bodies'way?" What does this mean? What he wants to say is "Which substances reduce or slow the intact of carbohydrates?" I can understand he wants to use colloquial English but the actual words he uses do not describe what he is talking about. The short 3 paragraphs then try to give us an understanding of how fiber, fat, acidic foods all slow digestion thus are good. But there is not enough content for the reader to have a clear understanding of how any of them work. So while I started with this diet and it has helped me change some life long eating habits - it's been because I can read around the excess words and poor writing and figure out the content of the material.
Rating:
Summary: Complex, Time-consuming, Expensive,Delicious, and, It Works!
Review: Anyone who follows these recipes should plan on spending three hours a day in the kitchen, and spending a good deal of money to buy a variety of exotic foods, not likely to be found in most kitchens. However, it one can do that, the food is DELICIOUS and the weight will pour off. Best of all cravings are non-existent in the month we've been on this diet, and 25 pounds have been left behind, most of them from the belly, as promised. It's obvious that this diet came from a wealthy area, where many probably have maids who can whip this food up and have incomes that will allow the purchase of these rather exotic -- though very interesting -- ingredients. If one can afford both the time and the money, this is a delightful way to improve one's overall health ... and physique.
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