The South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor-Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss by Dr. Arthur Agatston was published in 2003 and became a runaway best-seller. The book is really a 100-page essay on the diet plan followed by a couple of hundred pages of recipes. I bought the book in 2004 after gaining a significant amount of weight steadily over several years, finding myself at nearly 240 lbs for the first time in my life. The book sounded brilliant to me: the basic principles made too much sense to ignore and the author’s credentials as a famous heart doctor were undeniable.
I started the diet early in 2004 and wound up losing almost fifty pounds in just over eight months. In 2005 I cycled over 4,000 miles and rode the 2005 Ride for the Roses in Austin, TX, at 185 lbs, my lowest weight in over 15 years. The best part was that I kept the weight off consistently for almost three years. Unfortunately, I was diagnosed with cancer in October 2007, and had radical surgery that December.
I would love to blame my ensuing weight gain on the carb-boosters I was forced to take during my recovery, and the early post-surgery diet of Coke and potato chips that was the only thing I could keep down. No doubt that those things were factors in my reverting to the “carb-cycle” that the South Beach Diet had so effectively broken, but the truth is that I was so happy to be alive that I really didn’t care if I weighed 185 or 300.
Statistically, for the first three years following my surgery I had just a 35% chance of ten-year survival, so I fell into a pretty self-indulgent lifestyle with plenty of bad food choices and vast oceans of beer. I was quite happy through all of this, having taken the philosophical stance that I was going to enjoy every day that I was given.
On December 21st, 2010, I passed the three-year anniversary of my surgery and the statistics all changed. When I visited my doctor in January 2011 for my regular six-month tests, he told me that by surviving for three full years my statistical chance of ten-year survival had risen to over 85%. In fact, according to his own detailed analysis of my particular case, he put my chance of ten-year survival at 92%. I was a happy camper indeed that day.
One of the significant outcomes of that January visit was that I started looking at my body a bit differently. One day in late March of this year I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror after my morning shower and realized I was looking at a potentially very unhealthy person. I was sporting love handles and a pretty fair start at man-boobs, neither of which I had ever had, in addition to a very large pot belly. My neck was thick and saggy with fat and my face was fuller and rounder than it had ever been. My old inner voice began to speak for the first time since my illness.
“Hey, asshole,” it said, “You’re fat and getting fatter. You made it to three years and you’re probably not going to die. Don’t friggin’ kill yourself some another way because you survived cancer.”
Shaking my head, I dug back in the back of the closet and found the old electronic scale I had used weekly in 2004, dragged it into the bathroom, and hopped on.
I weighed 252 pounds.
I was stunned. I knew I was heavy, but at my worst I had never been close to 250, ever. Even when I did the diet in 2004 I started at 238 pounds. I resolved to start the South Beach Diet again as soon as possible. For various reasons, including my own inability to make the commitment I knew was absolutely necessary to get through the critical first two weeks (Phase One,) I didn’t finally start the South Beach Diet until April 25, 2011.
The principles of the SBD are pretty simple, and I’m not going to go over them in much detail, but here are the basics. You start off with two weeks of an extremely low-carb diet: no potatoes, bread, rice, pasta, or starches of any kind. Plus, no sugars: no fruit, no fruit juice, sodas, or sweetened drinks of any kind, and absolutely no alcoholic drinks at all. You even stay away from high glycemic index vegetables like carrots and corn. So what can you eat? As much low-fat, high protein food as you’d like in the form of lean meats, skinless poultry, and fish, and lots of leafy greens such as salads, broccoli, spinach, and green beans. Also, good fats are included, like olive and canola oil and small quantities of nuts. Fats help make you feel full, and that leads us to Dr. Agatston’s central thesis: diets fail because human beings will not tolerate hunger over long periods of time. You are not supposed to be hungry, so you always have something handy to munch, even if it’s unlimited quantities of celery sticks!
This two week hell regimen with nearly zero carbs puts your body in a state called ketosis, which essentially breaks the carb-cycle and makes your body burn fat. It’s all about the way carbs raise your blood sugar, followed by release of insulin to lower it, followed by the inevitable “carb crash” we all know, followed by cravings for more carbs. About six or seven days into Phase One, something near miraculous occurs: you lose the craving for carbs completely. And if you do Phase Two right, it doesn’t come back.
Phase Two of the SBD starts in the third week and lasts until you have achieved your target weight. You pick one specific day and time (Monday morning at 7:30am for me) to weigh yourself, and only do it once a week. In Phase Two the diet is much more forgiving, but the whole idea is to not add enough simple carbs back to trigger the old cravings and start the carb-cycle again. If that happens you’ll fail for sure because you’ll always be hungry. The idea is to lose 1.5 lbs/week. If you lose less than one or more than two pounds per week you are doing something wrong. I only looked at the prior four weeks rolling average weight loss and didn’t sweat the minor variations, and when all was said and done on December 19th I had averaged 1.58 lbs/week weight loss: pretty much right on the mark!
In my opinion there are two keys to successfully completing Phase One. First, you have to admit that it’s going to be really hard and you have to be 100% committed to get through the first 14 days. I had a huge advantage here because I had done it before and knew that if I followed through it would definitely work. The second key is preparation. You have to know exactly what you’re going to eat, and when, and you have to have all the food ready to go. I made my shopping list, stocked the right stuff, and also made sure I got rid of any foods extraneous to Phase One.
Once you get to Phase Two it actually becomes easy. You are typically way ahead of your plan (primarily due to water-weight loss but it still makes you feel good about those first two weeks) and the weight starts to come off like clockwork. One of the things that made this diet work so well for me is that it travels so well. There is virtually no situation in which you can find yourself where there is not something to eat that is SBD Phase Two compliant. Business dinner at a steakhouse? Petite filet, sautéed spinach and garlic, mushrooms, and you’re stuffed. Just ignore the bread plate and don’t order any potatoes or dessert and you’re golden. The best part is that if you’ve truly broken the carb-cycle you won’t even feel a craving for the bread or potatoes; I know I never have. And I always liked sashimi better than nigiri anyway. Airport fast food? Chicken Caesar salad, no croutons, please.
All that having been said, the SBD requires some discipline to be successful, and it’s unlikely that you’ll get to your target without a few hiccups. If you look at the graph of my own goals vs. actuals, you’ll see that I was way ahead of the plan for the first 24 weeks, albeit with some minor setbacks along the way. From week 25 through week 35, I started to “plateau.” I was down to losing an average of only a half a pound or so a week, and my weight went up as much as three pounds some weeks. At this point I kicked in a minimum of four hours of spinning classes per week while rigorously watching food intake to make sure I wasn’t adding any more calories. Even though the SBD explicitly states it is not a calorie-counting diet, at the end of the day you only lose weight if you burn more calories that you consume; the SBD just makes that easier. After 25 weeks on the program, it came down less to what I was eating and more to how much I was eating.
And drinking.
The SBD allows moderate drinking, particularly white wine. In the newer editions of the book, they have relaxed a lot of the more stringent requirements, such as no beer at all, no bread ever, etc. Personally, I did it old school, which worked for me. I allowed myself one night of beer drinking every two weeks, but only if my trailing four-week average weight loss was greater than 1.5 lbs. Otherwise, Sauvignon Blanc was my only friend. As a part of the difficult final push in weeks 34-35, I drank nothing Monday-Thursday, limiting myself to white wine on the three weekend nights.
On Monday, December 19th, 2011, I weighed in at 196.8 pounds on an original 35-week target of 196.0. I declared victory at that point, as my goal from the beginning was to achieve a permanently sustainable weight under 200 pounds. Thus the target of a four-pound cushion. I am reasonably certain that I can make a 3.2 pound cushion work just fine. Phase Three begins now, and has no dietary restrictions at all as long as weight remains stable, but obviously the idea is to have changed the way you eat and the way your body processes foods permanently. I will continue the once a week weigh-ins, and if things start going the wrong way I know exactly what to do!
The Tale of the Scale:
Start of Phase One: April 25, 2011.
Start of Phase Two: May 9, 2011
Start of Phase Three: December 19, 2011
Starting Weight: 252.0 lbs
Ending Weight: 196.8 lbs
Total Weight Loss: 55.2 lbs
Avg. Loss/Week: 1.58 lbs
Postscript: Dr. Agatston has just released a follow-up to the original South Beach Diet book called The South Beach Diet Wake Up Call: Why America is still Getting Fatter and Sicker, Plus 7 Simple Strategies for Reversing Our Toxic Lifestyle. It’s far more than a diet book, and highly recommended.
