Customer Reviews

The South Beach Diet Good Fats/Good Carbs Guide: The Complete and Easy Reference for All Your Favorite Foods

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This companion book to the original South Beach Diet book serves as an excellent resource for figuring out which foods we can have and which we must avoid. It's a food guide, not a full-blown description of the diet. As such, it suits it's purpose just fine.
I've lost over 30 pounds on this diet in the past 3 months, without suffering and misery. The similiarities between South Beach and Atkins are clear to see. So are the differences. South beach is the product of a cardiologist, which is aimed at preventing heart disease and diabetes. It's not just low carb, it's correct carbs. It also emphasizes avoiding saturated fats and trans-fats. With all due respect to the late Dr. Atkins and his diet, this one presents a healthier alternative that has proven effective. This isn't the only diet book out there but it's a good one with good explanations for those serious about losing weight in a safe manner.

"The South Beach Diet Good Fats Good Carbs Guide" is a 138 page companion book to the best selling book, "The South Beach Diet".

According to the author, Dr. Arthur Agatston all fats and carbs are not created equal. The good fats and carbs will nourish your body, help you stay healthy and lose weight. Eating the wrong kinds will trigger cravings, decrease your ability to burn off calories and make you hungry.

In this book, Dr. Agatston shows you at a glance which fats and carbs are compatable with "The South Beach Diet". Each entry lists a food item, its carbohyrate, sugar and fat grams. Foods are then ranked as limited, very limited or avoid. There are over 1,200 listings.

The beginning of the book gives a quick overview of "The South Beach Diet". It describes why we need to select certain foods in order to lose weight and get healthy. Though it does not go into the great detail of the original South Beach Diet book, you could purchase this mini book and learn enough to be able to follow the diet successfully.

The book packs in a lot of information. In addition to the overview, and food ratings there are also shopping tips and meal makeovers. A handy dining out section makes it easier to stay on the South Beach track at your favorite restaurants.
A quick guide also lists what foods to enjoy on each phase of the diet.

The only drawback to the book is though its smaller than a normal sized book (7" tall by 5" wide), it's still to large to fit in a pocketbook. It would be nice if it were smaller, making it more portable, thus I deducted one star.
Other than that, the book is a super handy resource, excellent for those following the South Beach diet or concerned about their health.

This review was written originally in December, 2004 and was about the first edition. Since then, a new edition has appeared, and some of the faults I found with the original book have been addressed. Since the original edition is still available, I have left my review intact. However, I have added comments at the end to address the changes. If you are planning to buy the revised edition, see the comments at the end too.

Original review:
If you are looking for a diet that is easy to follow, does not leave you hungry, is effective, nutritionally balanced, and improves your overall health, the South Beach Diet may be for you. In this companion book to The South Beach Diet book, Dr. Agatston lists many common foods, as well as whether they can be enjoyed in abundance, limited, or avoided completely. While this could have been done with a simple food list, this information is presented in a table that also lists carbs, sugar, and total fat.

The beginning of the book gives a brief overview of the diet, and a discussion of trans fats and why they should be avoided. It also has a discussion of the glycemic index. Although the recommendations in the book are based on glycemic index, glycemic load, and other factors, this information does NOT appear in the tables, purportedly because it's not available for all foods. Leaving it out for that reason, even when known, defies credibility.

As followers of this diet know, it's not about following the glycemic index, or counting calories or carbs. While the GI may serve as a guideline to let you know where foods fit in, it can also be misleading since some foods with similar GI values may not be of equal value to your diet. All this is explained in the main diet book, which gives a brief list of GI values for common foods. Likewise, we are told that total fat is not the big factor, but how much is saturated or trans fat vs unsaturated fats is important. That distinction is not made in the tables, which list total fat.

If a strict look at those factors is not a necessary part of the diet, then why are they in the table? That's not clear. The portion that describes how to use the guide acknowledges that you need not be a slave to the numbers, but the real advice ultimately boils down to following the main diet book, in which case all but the last column (whether and how much to eat) seems irrelevant.

The other problem is that this supposedly complete book is far from complete. It has too many entries for items that are obviously not allowed on the diet, and few entries for what might be suitable substitutes.

If you look at breakfast foods for instance, you'll find bacon and eggs, cereals, and pancakes. Yet you won't find French toast. You may be able to figure it out based on the rules from the diet book, but then why do you need this book? It's not as if processed foods or foods prepared from recipes that may vary were left out. There seems to be no rationale for what's included.

If you do look at cereal, you will find a couple of pages of cereals that are limited or should be avoided completely. But do I really need this book to tell me to avoid Frosted Flakes and Corn Pops if I know how the diet works? Yet if I look at the myriad "healthy" cereals in my supermarket, not one of them is listed in this book. The same is true for the ones in natural food stores, even if they are available nationwide.

I might be able to figure out on my own that Uncle Sam cereal is a good choice, but then why buy the book? On the other hand, I might find another supposedly healthful cereal, and the label may show me that it's whole grain and high in fiber, but has more sugar than I would want. It's foods like these for which I would like the book to give me an idea if it's acceptable.

There are way too many common foods left off the list, which is surprising considering the exhaustive permutations and combinations listed for others. I don't need five pages to tell me that all baked and broiled fish is good, but breaded fish is not. If it's the recommendation that counts, I don't need a separate entry for tuna, canned, light, in water, and different ones for dark tuna in all its permutations, when ultimately, they fall into the same recommendation as other fish.

The bottom line is that if you stick to the main diet book, and manage to work around the flaws in the way it was written, you won't need this guide. This book might be helpful if you are on Atkins or even Weight Watchers, however.

UPDATE:

Although the original edition listed only the total amount of fat for each entry, the new edition lists both total fat and saturated fat. It also lists recommendations based on the phase of the diet, which makes more sense than the former blanket recommendation.

Saturated fats and trans-fats are culprits in a bad diet, so it's good to know the balance of "good fats" to "bad fats." Since trans fats are not listed, a reader cannot assume that whatever is not saturated is a "good fat." But since trans-fat levels will not be listed on nutrition labels until 2006, the advice given to read the ingredient list is the most sensible solution for now. This new way of listing fats is a welcome improvement, and the remaining issue with trans-fat listing is the fault of the food manufacturers, not the book.

The new edition covers many more foods, but still lacks much of what was missing in the first edition. I had mentioned that Uncle Sam cereal was inexplicably missing from the tables, and now it is there. So are many others, especially ones that are co-branded Kraft/South Beach Diet foods. This latter point seems a bit self serving. I doubt that anybody would reasonably expect that South Beach Diet foods would not be compatible with the diet, so it really adds little practical value. Other commonly available cereals that may border on acceptability are still missing, and those are the ones I would use a guide for.

As supermarkets add more and more whole grain foods, it would be helpful if they appeared in a guide such as this. For example, whole grain waffles that are as low in sugar and higher in fiber than SBD branded foods are now easy to find in the market, but are still not in this guide. Many common breakfast cereals are now marketed as whole grain and it's not necessarily clear why they are listed the way they are.

I wondered why something like SBD Whole Grain Crunch was listed as "good" for phase two and three, but Cheerios is listed as "limited," meaning once a week at most. They are identical in calories and almost identical in carbohydrates. But the SBD cereal has four times the sugar and only a gram more fiber. Then I noticed that both this edition and the previous one list six grams of sugar for Cheerios, while the cereal package lists only one gram per serving. A taste test makes it clear that it's the book that's wrong here. While I doubt that it's a deliberate effort to promote his own foods over competing products, having a guide book with such gross errors raises questions. I don't need a book to tell me to avoid virtually all commercial cereals except for the South Beach Diet branded ones.

The book continues to list total carbohydrates, while at the same time, telling the reader that total carbohydrates are irrelevant. Perhaps this column listing would help somebody who is on the Atkins diet, but the author is not recommending the Atkins diet.

The second edition is an improvement over the first edition. If a food is listed as good for a given phase, it's probably a good food to eat. But if it's not listed, reading the ingredients and the nutrition label for the food is still the best bet. Skimming through the book may help to give an idea of what foods are good or bad, but if you are in a supermarket, the package in front of you may be a better indicator than the book.

If you feel that it's more important to gain a strong understanding of how the diet works and to be able to figure out on your own what foods will work, then the main diet book is much more helful for that. If you are more interested in picking foods and using recipes because somebody gives it a stamp of approval, and you don't want to risk making a bad choice, then using this guide in conjunction with the South Beach Diet cook books will provide you with tools you need.

This guide seemed like the answer to my needs. I wanted something I could keep in the car as a guide for when I go shopping or to restaurants. However, it's failing in many respects.

The guide doesn't give you actual net carb counts for items. Instead, it just rates them on good/average/poor, etc. There's no glycemic index indication or rating. The information for restaurants is very general. I would have liked to have seen charts for popular fast food chains, for example. And given that this is a South Beach branded guide, why oh why doesn't it mark each item with what phase it's acceptable for?

There are plenty of better pocket guides out there. I'd recommend getting an up-to-date version of another guide instead. This one just seems to be capitalizing on a trend without actually providing useful information.

The South Beach diet is a healthy alternative to the Atkins diet and allows enough variety in your diet to maintain a "healthy lifestyle, not just a diet." This is not a cookbook and offers only a few pages of discussion about the diet itself. Use this book as a supplement to the main South Beach Diet book. The book discusses the basic framework of the South Beach diet, including important information about the glycemic index of certain foods, which play a key role in insulin production and fat gain. The basic premise of the book, according to the author, is to help you "consume the right carbs and the right fats and learn to snack strategically."

To teach you how to do this, the book categorizes carb rich foods according to good and poor choices. For example, whole grains, legumes, rice, and starchy vegetables are listed as good carbs, while crackers, pasta, white bread, and processed food products are bad. The bulk of this small paperback is dedicated to lists of foods with their respective carbs, fat, protein, and sugar listed in grams. In short, it is a reference book that supplements the information you get from "The South Beach Diet" book.

Eating of course, is enjoyable, while dieting is a pain. However, having lost approximately 50 pounds over the past 18 months, I can tell you the pleasure of feeling and looking better is worth the inconvenience. Atkins helped me lose weight, but I could only take so much fatty foods, while longing for the crisp, clean taste of fresh fruit. I also read Dr. Phil's book and learned about how my emotions (stress, anger, boredom, etc) effect the way I eat. Trying to diet without understanding why you eat is an uphill battle, so I would recommend you try Dr. Phil and South Beach together.

The "Good Fats/Good Carbs Guide" is a great little companion to "The South Beach Diet." It's helpful for quick food references when making food selections. It's geared toward the lifestyle approach of the South Beach plan, listing foods as "allowed, good, limited" etc. It has helpful suggestions when fast food is your only option and other difficult situations to maintain your healthy eating style.

Having purchased "The South Beach Diet", I thought that this would be a fairly comprehensive supplement of foods to avoid and foods which are acceptable. However, the book, which is only slightly over 100 pages to begin with, re-iterates much of what is in "The South Beach Diet" without the very informative sections about how our bodies process foods and without the specific details of the actual diet program. Unfortunately, the food list was far from exhaustive, failing to include even products like V-8 [even though vegetable juice cocktail is included in the suggested breakfast menus]. The jacket states that it has 1200 food listings, but that is not 1200 different foods. Many, many items have multiple listings. For instance, 4 listings for canned peaches, depending on syrup. 12 listings for different cookies, all of which are to be avoided, but none of the listings are for chocolate chip which would be a typical cookie. Bottom line: I was disappointed; this is OK book; not sure it is worth $8.00.

I purchased this book right before the new year. I had just seen the picture of the bride's maid's dress I was going to have to wear in front of 400 people in a matter of months. It took only a few minutes to read the narrative portion. I then took the thorough listing of foods that were good carbs/good fats and made a grocery list. Between December 27th and May 8th (the wedding day), I lost 30 pounds, dropped 4 pants sizes, and feel healthier than ever! I did not follow a meal plan and rarely used recipes. I just ate the foods that were allowed and didn't eat the ones that weren't. I highly reccommend this book!

The South Beach diet was like a miracle for me. After several years of unsuccessful weight loss attempts on tiny caloric diets, the weight just dropped off me with the South Beach diet.

I originally memorized some foods that I could always count on to be low fat and low glycemic. Over time, my wife would ask me if I could have food X or Y. Since this question always came up at the grocery store or in a restaurant, I couldn't answer her . . . because my copy of the South Beach diet was at home.

I also found that I couldn't remember very well what a portion was without constantly referring to the original book. That was frustrating too.

The South Beach Diet Good Fats Good Carbs Guide proved to be a solution to all of these problems. It has all the information I want about what foods to eat and which to avoid . . . and what a portion size is. Whew! With this guide, the South Beach Diet becomes even easier . . . and tastier too. A lot of foods that I had been avoiding are actually all right on the diet.

The size of this book will fit into almost any purse and jacket pocket. It will even fit into a hip pocket (but it won't be very comfortable to sit on).

If you've liked the South Beach diet, I suggest that you give yourself the gift of this book as well.

If you haven't tried the South Beach diet yet, I suggest that you buy both The South Beach Diet book and this one. You'll do even better, I think, if you do.

Nice job, Dr. Agatston!

I just picked this up at our local Wal Mart. As the title indicates, this offers you a guide to the best foods that are low carb in nature and good fats which are typically so lacking in most diet programs.

I love the South Beach Diet. Having been on and off Atkins too, the benefit of South Beach is more carbs and less fat. Protein is about the same. I have more energy with South Beach than with Atkins although sometimes to break a plateu, I will go back on Atkins.

I highly recommend this books along with the South Beach Diet book to help you reach your weight loss goals.