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Rating: 
Summary: Complex, Costly, Time-Consuming, and It Works!!
Review: Having been on the South Beach Diet for a month, I've lost 17 pounds and feel wonderful. The diet, very restrctive meal plans for each day, results in REALLY tasty meals and one certainly doesn't get hungry. There are many things about this diet, and this book, that I highly recommend.However: 1) No one warns you that fixing all of these complex meals means that you [in South Beach it would be your maid?] will be spending about three hours a day in the kitchen, meticulously making these complex menus, many of which have rather unusual chi-chi ingredients. 2) Speaking of chi-chi, it's easy to see why this came from South Beach Miami; the food for this diet is expensive! Many people will be buying a whole range of foods they've NEVER bought before, including rather exotic things like a wide variety of vinegars, fresh spices, tahini, hummus, Edamama soybeans and on and on. If you've got lots of time to cook and money, this diet is tasty, complex to prepare, and very satisfying ... as is the easy loss of weight.
Rating: 
Summary: Easy to follow and I saw results immediately
Review: I've always been intimidated or annoyed with diet books -they are sort of like reading manuals, which I also hate. But this book is concise and really easy to follow, and the fact that the diet is so restrictive and unambiguous in the first two weeks makes it easy to stay on track. They key is that you are allowed to each as much as you want as long as you stay away from the sugars and the refined-foods carbs. But, you still end up eating a lot less than you used to because you aren't hungry. I can't say that at first I wasn't finding it hard to resist a huge pile of pancakes, but I was losing about a pound a day and that is an amazing motivator. Also I found that my energy level for my cardio workouts was down at first. I'm a victim of the high tech world and I've gained 25 pounds in the last six years. I'm going to South Beach in a few months, which was a great motivator to loose weight, and I'm achieving amazing results with this book. All my pants were loose on my after the first four days - it's like after all this time my body is saying "thank you!" for eating right and is rewarding me with rapid weight loss. This is a healthy diet that encourages the consumption of food in a satisfying quantity in its most natural state - not overly processed or refined or sugary. It's the type of food we are meant to be eating.
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.
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