With the South Beach Diet, you are encouraged to have snacks in between three course meals. However, during the first two week of the diet, you are not permitted to eat any bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and any fruit. In other words, you are not allowed to eat carbohydrates; this includes chocolates, sugar and cakes. This is when you notice the effects of the South Beach Diet as by decreasing bad carbs, you tend to metabolize what you eat more effectively. This leads to improvement in insulin resistance and weight loss.

You are advised to eat more of chicken, meat, turkey, fish, eggs and shellfish during this phase. Vegetables, cheese, salad veggies and nuts too are permitted. This phase can be easily handled by bread lovers as you eventually lose the urge to eat these foods. This is because there is a switch in the body that switches on to give cravings for fat storing fat. However, after these two weeks, this switch switches to the off position.

After these two weeks, these forbidden foods are gradually added to the diet. You are at liberty of choosing which foods to re-introduce in moderation. However, don’t eat these foods as frequently as you used to eat them. Though you may lose weight in this phase, it would not be as much as you lost in the first phase of the diet. Then you pass onto the third phase of the diet, which you have to follow for the rest of your life. By this time, most of your cravings for bad foods reach a minimum. However, if you feel you regain weight here, you just have to go back to phases one and two and follow them till you lose weight again.

The basic of South Beach Diet is that you learn to find out your body’s weight loss patterns, and how your body reacts to some foods. You then have to switch between the different phases of the diet to maintain your weight.