A new thrilling diet experience

[serinde]

Out of solidarity for naudia, the household begins the South Beach Diet today. I do okay with plain calorie counting--when I stick to it!--but this is like to do me no harm, and may do good. And if the two of us are militant, then audiovile has no choice but to come along, as we do all the hunting, gathering, & preparation of food, and he knows only the number of the pizza place; and it will do him no end of good, high blood pressure & non-exercising creature that he is.

It's certainly a lot more sensible than, say, Atkins, and starting my day with a mushroom-and-reduced-fat-Swiss omelette does not suck; though as usual, being deprived of fruit and bread makes me whiny. This one cup of caffeine per day business, though, we're going to have to have talks about that. Also, I loathe plain raw celery, which is the only convenient snacking veg on the list for the first two weeks.

(I'm going to log calories per usual, purely for my own curiosity. It's been said that the reason Atkins actually works for some people is not ketosis but because you feel less hungry eating all that protein and fat, and I wonder whether this might be similar, at least for protein reasons.)

Comments

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I was told ketosis was a Bad Thing by the diabetes nurse when I was setting up my meal plan, and got test strips to make sure I wasn't passing ketones after switching to a lower carb diet.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia suggests you may mean ketoacidosis, which is for non-diabetics only something that happens if you're doing the ketosis thing and not drinking enough water.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

That's probably it. I was told that too much ketones would be toxic.

[naudia.livejournal.com]

People say ketosis when they mean separate things. The kind you're speaking of can be fatal. Whereas I'm to understand that simply burning fat releases ketones, and you have the ketosis that people are aiming for. The SB diet has little to do with the Atkins diet as you aren't trying to induce a long term ketosis. The theory here is that by preventing the severe ups and downs by cutting out sugar and flour (only for the first two weeks, then things like whole grain breads and berries come back) reduces the amount of insulin released to compensate. That way you burn fat instead of storing it. The SB is also based on the pure idea that eating things that are more basic and nutritious might just be better for you :) It works for some people, it doesn't for others for various reasons having to do with metabolism, what kind of eating habits they can sustain, yadda yadda.

[nancaurelia.livejournal.com]

I've been lately eating egg-white-mushroom-and-reduced-fat-feta omelettes instead. (Since Feta is so strong, you only need a little bit of it.) They don't suck either.