Want to Lose Weight?

Want to lose weight?

Want to lose weight? Drink this or maybe you would rather take a pill. In this day and age there is a different diet created daily. It is no surprise then, that most people become discouraged after repeatedly failing at diets that don’t back up what they say. Amongst all these diets it can become difficult to know which diets really works. Two of the most popular brands are South Beach and Atkins diets both are similar but South Beach is healthier for your heart by far.

The South Beach diet begins with a 2 week initiation phase where carbohydrates are restricted this phase is very similarly to Atkins. After this first phase South Beach diet begins to differ from Atkins by two significant ways. The first one is that South Beach diet allows a person to have carbohydrates and not have saturated fats. South Beach would use extra virgin olive oil instead of cooking with butter. Atkins would have you not having any carbohydrates and eating as much saturated fat as you would like.

South Beach diet works because of the glycemic index. The glycemic index determines good carbohydrates from bad carbohydrates. Whole wheat products, wild rice and natural sugars would be considered good carbohydrate. Bad Carbohydrates would be refined flour products, potatoes, pasta, and white rice. The glycemic index essentially estimates how rapidly blood glucose rise after eating a carbohydrate. This is important because keeping insulin levels low is the central principle behind all low carbohydrate diets. (Richard) Bad carbohydrates have a high glycemic index and are not allowed. This is where white bread would fall under. While good carbohydrates have a low glycemic index such as in whole wheat bread.

Atkins diet started this low carbohydrate diet craze in the United States and around the world. Millions of people have tried this diet world wide. The book alone has been on the bestseller lists for a decade. Many Americans changed their way of thinking. This was a change of pace from the old thinking of lowering your fat intake as being the common diet. Which is why in the 80’s and early 90’s everything was fat free, but because of Atkins diet the market changed instead of fat free being the mainstream. The market was flooded and still is being saturated daily by new low carbohydrate products.

The Atkins diet begins just like South Beach diet by not allowing any carbohydrate intake for two weeks. After the first two weeks one may have carbohydrates only if they come from fibers. The easiest way to figure this out is to look at the nutritional panel and see how many carbohydrates there are. Then look and see how much fiber there is. As long as the grams of fiber are equal to or greater than the amount of carbohydrates you can eat it. This is where the term net carbohydrates will come into play. For example if a product has ten carbohydrates and nine grams of fiber then that item only has one net carbohydrate because those other nine carbohydrates come from fibers.

The world's largest organization of food and nutrition professionals known as Journal of the American Dietetics Association calls the Atkins diet "a nightmare of a diet." The official spokesperson of the American Dietetic Association elaborated.