Thread: gullyfourmyle and the South Beach Diet

Over the past thirty years I've looked at a lot of fad diets and sneered at each and everyone of them. They all had major shortcomings and pretty well all of them are outright frauds.

When the South Beach Diet came along, my wife bought the book. I read it and was favourably impressed for once.

As a diet it pushed all the right buttons. It is a great concept and anyone other than an Inuit could live a long healthy life on it.

But for one thing.

Most people are not cooks or professional shoppers or very organized about how they acquire and store their meals.

Once you've learned the theory that is the operating system the SB diet runs on, anyone would think it simplicity itself to go and get the proper foods, store them by meal and consume them in that fashion.

Unfortunately, real people aren't scientists who write out their proceedures step by step, pre-prepare and record how it all goes together.

In real life, after the initial interest wanes, the meals somehow get mixed up, some vital ingredient wasn't bought and before you know it, the book is on the shelf and the old standby foods back in cupboards and fridges.

Besides that, between the prep time to sort out the meal portions fresh from the grocery so they'll be ready the right day and then the hunt for the right meal in the forest of baggies and tubs, only to find that by the end of the week, some of the food has evolved into a new, fuzzier life form thanks to a poorly sealed container, it all gets to be a chore. It's something you have to really think about in a life that has no time for thinking about something not directly connected to working, flaking out, sleeping or travelling from one to the other. You need a cook or a servant to take care of the details.

Most people, women included, are lousy cooks. If they weren't there would be no such thing as restaurants. My wife is a great cook. But even so, our lifestyles were too demanding to accomodate the South Beach Diet as good as it undeniably is.

Can you afford to hire a servant? No? Neither could I. So there the South Park books sits. It one day will be an antique book some one will dig up in an archeological site.

Make no mistake though, as good as the South Beach Diet is, it is still only a diet, not a health restoration process despite the fact that on it, your health is bound to improve.

The South Beach Diet process doesn't incorporate fasting into its regimen and that is a huge omission for a book that is about getting healthy through a dietary process. Even if you aren't trying to restore health, regular fasting keeps you healthy.

That's because a fast is the way all mammals houseclean the insides of their bodies. We are mammals. We evolved on PLANET EARTH. We are bound by its rules. If you somehow think you are different and don't need to fast, you're in for a rude awakening at some point.

As I've noted in other threads, fasting is like the oil change you have done on your car. If you don't change the oil, it fills with sludge and eventually dies. If you don't fast, the useless, poisonous sludge you stored like it was a pet goldfish will eventually become the shark that consumes you.

Interesting read gullyfourmyle. Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this diet.

I was a little surprised about fasting that it is good to fast sometimes. That really caught my attention becaue I never saw fasting as an alternative of detoxifying the body.

That was my reaction when I first read the article because I always believed the fasting isn't good for the body because it makes you eat more that sometimes isn't good not only for the purpose of losing weight but for overall health. If you notice when you are too hungry, the body becomes too weak and so does the intestines. Eating lots of food when it is weak isn't always good for me as I have difficulty digesting the food.