Is The South beach Diet a Good Choice for Losing Weight?

Hi and welcome back to an article I wanted to write on the subject of losing weight, which is a pretty big part of health, that loos at one of the popular diet plans and asks is the South Beach Diet a good choice for losing weight? Let's have a look and see.

Well, the first thing you have to remember is that this is a diet plan that you have to pay for and as a member, you pay a monthly subscription for the diet meals to be delivered to you as well as having access to their online community. The meals themselves follow a three phase plan, where the first is the hardest and cuts out most carbohydrates from your diet for a period of about two weeks. Now, I don't personally like the idea of omitting any major food groups from your diet from a health aspect, but if you are serious about losing weight, then if that restriction is short term, then I guess its okay. The idea is to get your body used to burning stored up fats for its main source of fuel that the omitted carbs would have supplied. This is loosely based on the Atkins Diet idea but taken only over a short period.

Into phase two and carbs are slowly re-introduced to the diet while keeping things low calorie so the body is still burning fats but the calorie restriction prevents a reversal of the weight lost in the first two weeks. Phase two is popular with those that have been on the South Beach Diet and the meals are actually pretty interesting, tasty and fulfilling.

Phase three relaxes things further and can last as long as you remain a member of the plan. During this last phase, you can eat mostly what you want although you are still encouraged to maintain a calorie restricted diet. the community forums keep members in touch with each other and gives moral support to anyone who needs it as well as being a place to come in online and chat about your particular successes and trip ups.

Its a reasonably good diet and, like all diets, if you follow the rules you will lose weight and as long as you stay with the plan, you will keep that weight off. If you need some more information, you could always check out this article at South Beach Diet which has more details plus links to full blown customer reviews that are helpful if you need to hear it from the horses mouth.

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Convenience Diets for Losing Weight

There are many ways to lose some weight or even a lot of weight if you need to these days. But still, one of the most popular forms is through diet. Dieting is a huge industry and there are no shortage of companies that will offer you a wide range of propriety diet plans to help you to lose the weight you want to lose. One area where there seems to be a growing trend for is in the convenience diets and these are the ones that come ready made and even delivered to your door, making them highly convenient in every sense of the word.

This type of diet plan is perfect for anyone who leads a busy lifestyle and has little time on their hands to mess around with the hassle of working with a regular diet. It means shopping for all the right foods, counting calories and filling in charts, preparing and cooking the food, then doing it all again the next day. With the convenience diets, all that work is cut out and all you have to do is take one ready prepared diet meal and microwave it until its hot (or just get it out of the fridge if its a cold meal like a salad or similar) and you're ready to sit down to your meal in the full knowledge that it will be low in calories and high in nutritional value.

So what kind of companies provide this type of diet? Well, there are several as already mentioned, but probably the best known of these is Nutrisystem, as mentioned in this blog in an older post. There are others that provide a similar service and I guess it really boils down to you doing some research such as reading Nutrisystem reviews (such as this one here) and also reviews of other products like Jenny Craig, South beach Diet, Zone Diet etc and comparing them on price, service, variety of meals and that kind of thing.

While ready meals will never replace a good, healthy home prepared and cooked meal for full control over what goes into them, they do fill a gap in the lives of those who just don't have time for the mechanics of diets, but do have a need to lose weight. The companies that provide them know this and they have a niche carved out for them by today's busy lifestyle, so you can't really blame them for exploiting that need. Its horses for courses for sure!

My Health Today