Living Low Carb (49 page)
Authors: Jonny Bowden
The genius of Agatston is that he has taken this information and made it extremely user-friendly and accessible, and has done so while making sure not to alienate his more conservative colleagues in the medical profession. This makes it much more likely that his important message will actually be heard. The friendly tone, accessibility, and overall permissiveness of the plan practically guarantees that its intelligent, lower-carb message will reach thousands of people who might have ignored the more “militant” platforms. For that we owe Agatston a lot of thanks. Adopting some form of the South Beach Diet would represent a giant step forward for most Americans, and because it is presented in such an unintimidating way—and possibly even because it is not substantially outside the medical mainstream in its avoidance of saturated fat—it’s more likely that people will adopt it.
A
RTHUR
A
GATSTON
, MD
WITH
J
OSEPH
S
IGNORILE
, P
H
D
WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL
The South Beach Diet plus an exercise program.
About South Beach Recharged
Let me be honest: in the first two editions of the book you’re reading right now (when it was titled
Living the Low Carb Life
), I rated the original South Beach Diet a little higher than it deserved (I gave it five stars).
Here’s why. At that time, any deviation from the god-awful “wisdom” of conventional dietetics was a blessing, and South Beach was certainly a departure from the mainstream. I felt it deserved kudos for its emphasis on protein and vegetables and for its movement away from processed carbs. It was also (still is) an extremely user-friendly diet, and one to which conventional docs would not raise major objections since it was so low in saturated fat.
But truth be told, the original South Beach diet could easily (and not entirely unfairly) be characterized as “Atkins for two weeks followed by the Zone.” It wasn’t original. It “bought into” the demonization of saturated fat, and it was downright uninformed about supplements.
But, still. In that market—which, remember, worshipped the god-awful USDA Food Health Pyramid—it was a breath of fresh air.
South Beach Recharged
is quite a bit better than the original. It still suffers from conceptual incoherence (although it’s in three “stages,” the third stage is unclear and virtually impossible to explain), and it’s still very conventional on saturated fat; but overall the book has some really good things to recommend it, and I’d take this version over the original any day of the week.
The most obvious difference between the original South Beach and South Beach Recharged is the addition of an exercise program based on my favorite type of workout, interval training (more on that in a moment). It’s also clearly meant for people who are fairly new to exercise, which is not necessarily a bad thing at all—the program is uncomplicated, doesn’t require equipment, and is easy to follow, thus removing some significant barriers to exercise for a lot of people.
The exercise portion is based on walking, but it’s not just your usual exercise prescription (e.g., “30 minutes walk”). Instead, the program uses the principles of interval training. You walk at one of four intensities—easy pace, moderate pace, “revved up,” and “supercharged.” Like all intervaltraining programs, the idea is to alternate short bursts of high-intensity exercise with slightly longer and more laid-back periods of “active rest” (which means continuing to exercise, but at a much lower level of intensity while you catch your breath). In the case of South Beach Recharged, you alternate fast walking for between 15 and 60 seconds with longer “recovery periods.”
You can build up intensity and difficulty by making the “fast” periods longer and the “relaxed” periods shorter. Gym rats take note: you can also use aerobic equipment like an elliptical machine for the interval program if you want.
Agatston favors interval training because “it send(s) your metabolism soaring when you work your body at higher intensities, but you have to work hard for only a short time to achieve that result.” He’s right. I’ve written a lot about interval—or “burst”—training in my book
The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth
, and I’ve been a big fan of this kind of workout for years.
To accompany the interval walking, Agatston has a strength-andflexibility component called the “Total Body Workout.” (You do the interval walking and the Total Body Workout on alternate days.) The Total Body Workout is comprised of basic exercises, all of which can be done at home with minimal equipment (a chair, a step, a towel, and so forth). They’re well described and well illustrated. Both the interval walking and the Total Body Workout program have a Phase One, a Phase Two, and a Phase Three, presumably to accompany the diet portion of the program. Everything you’re supposed to do is laid out for you with elegant clarity—Phase One: week one, week two; Phase Two: week one, week two; and so on.
There’s also a welcome section on belly fat and inflammation and a discussion of the different metabolic risks for “apples” (who store their fat around the middle) and “pears” (who store it around the thighs, hips, and butt). And he’s bullish on fish oil, which is always a plus. Plus there’s an excellent recipe section—always a selling point of the South Beach franchise—which is terrific as usual.
South Beach Recharged as a Lifestyle: Who It Works for, Who Should Look Elsewhere
This is a perfectly acceptable program that will work for most people, especially those who find very-low-carb programs to be unmanageable. It’s also perfectly suitable for those who just have an extra 10 or 20 pounds to lose. Those who have a lot more than 10 or 20 pounds to lose and those who are insulin-resistant might find a better fit with another program. The diet is often frustrating to people who prefer a lot more specific instruction about what they can and can’t eat. If you’re okay with more general guidelines, you might like this program a lot.
JONNY’S LOWDOWN
½
The dietary program is pretty much the same as the original South Beach Diet. He’s still anti-saturated fat, he’s still pretty liberal on bread, he’s still just a tad short of “cutting-edge” on the latest research on low-carb diets, and I still can’t figure out for the life of me what “Phase Three” is. But all in all, this is a very userfriendly program made a whole lot better by the addition of a very “doable” exercise program.
It will appeal to a lot of people, deservedly.
H. L
EIGHTON
S
TEWARD
, M.S., M
ORRISON
B
ETHEA
, MD, S
AMUEL
A
NDREWS
, MD,
AND
L
UIS
B
ALART
, MD
WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL
Lower-carb for dummies—technically, it’s not a low-carb diet at all. A basic plan that essentially focuses on reducing or eliminating sugar from the diet. No counting of calories, carbs, protein, or fat.
About Sugar Busters!
Sugar Busters!
was the brainchild of a Fortune 500 CEO and three respected New Orleans doctors—a cardiovascular surgeon, an endocrinologist, and a gastroenterologist—whose success with this way of eating led to the publication of the book. Legend has it that it was originally a self-published manuscript that circulated, got enormous attention, and eventually landed the authors a real book deal.
The four basic premises of
Sugar Busters!
are really simple.
1. Too much insulin wreaks havoc on our bodies and is a huge player in the weight-loss game.
2. Sugar produces insulin.
3. Sugar is toxic.
4. If you reduce sugar with the
Sugar Busters!
diet, you will control insulin.
Like many of the authors discussed in this book, the authors of
Sugar Busters!
subscribe to the theory that calories are not as important as the
type
of foods eaten. They cite a study from the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
that concluded that calorie intake alone is not sufficient to predict weight gain or loss in any given individual.
8
They also subscribe to the theory that it is not dietary fat that makes you fat, so much as it is dietary sugar. (By now, you understand the reason: excess carbohydrates feed the production mill for triglycerides, the form of fat that is stored in the fat tissues.)
Not only does dietary sugar get converted into fat, but, as you remember from
chapter 2
, lots of sugar and carbs in the diet produce increased levels of insulin, the hormone that creates fat storage
and
blocks fat-burning (technically called lipolysis). The authors say, quite correctly, that “we cannot survive without insulin,
but
we can survive a lot better without
too much
insulin.” That’s a darn good quote. Dietary sugar is now recognized as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease, largely through the mechanism of its effect on insulin secretion. Insulin also causes retention of salt (increasing blood pressure) and a thickening of the arterial walls (see
chapter 2
for details). The authors state that it also causes enlargement of the left ventricle, which is the chamber involved in 99 percent of heart attacks, and that it causes the development of plaque in or on the walls of blood vessels.
Glucagon, the sister hormone of insulin, also produced by the pancreas, has the opposite effect of insulin. It tells the body to break down fat. It is a “releasing” hormone, not a “storing” hormone. Glucagon tends to rise after a higher-protein meal and is inhibited by high levels of insulin.
So it is no surprise that the stated purpose of the
Sugar Busters!
diet is this:
controlling insulin by controlling sugar
. To eliminate or reduce the sugars that are so detrimental to your health and your waistline, the authors rely heavily on the
glycemic index
, a measure of how quickly blood sugar is raised in response to a food (more on this in Jonny’s Lowdown). The authors state that knowledge of the glycemic index is key to understanding the
Sugar Busters!
diet concept. There is a list of acceptable and unacceptable foods, based largely on the glycemic index. (This list of acceptable foods is way larger than that of many of the plans in
Living Low Carb
.)