In recent times the South Beach diet has become a popular weight loss program because of the emphasis it places on nutrition and eating habits that helps dieters find the right balance between nutrition and dieting.

Originally developed by an American cardiologist for his patients, the South Beach Diet is known to many dieters as an effective way of losing weight and keeping the fat off.

The basic principle behind the South Beach Diet is that while most diets concentrate on taking away fats or carbohydrates, the South Beach Diet proposes that some carbohydrates and fats are actually good for you and that the ones that do not add nutrients or energy to your diet should be eliminated and the consumption of good carbohydrates and fats should be encouraged.

The kind of fats that the South Beach diet encourages are the healthy unsaturated fats from olive oil and canola oil, for example, and the natural omega-3 rich oil found in fish. Additionally, the South Beach Diet recommends that people get their protein mainly from legumes, nuts, fish and poultry, with red meat eaten less regularly.

The South Beach Diet is divided into stages. Each stage is designed to help the body to adjust to new changes in lifestyle with new eating habits.

Stage 1

During the first stage of the diet which lasts for two weeks, it is important to find foods that do not have saturated fats in them or carbohydrates that may not be healthy like bread, potatoes, sugar, candy, cereals and grains, fruits, baked goods and other types of sugar containing foods. The idea here is that once you cut these foods out for two weeks, your body should be able to balance itself with the nutrients that it needs.

Stage 2

After two weeks the second stage begins and it is in this stage that you can then begin re-introducing, in small quantities, some of the foods that were initially eliminated in stage one. During this time, you will need to figure out how much you need to eat as well as how much weight you want to lose. This will help you to determine how much of each food you can safely put back into your diet in order to stay balanced.

Stage 3

After the dieter reaches the desired weight that he or she wanted to achieve, stage three of the diet begins. In stage three the diet expands to include three servings of fruit a day and three servings of whole-grain a day. The third stage of the South Beach diet is particularly important because it is in stage 3 that the dieter learns to maintain the body weight that he has achieved, while continuing to eat a nutritious and a balanced diet.

Overall, the South Beach diet will provide information on what kinds of foods to eat. This includes seafood, lighter types of meat like chicken, vegetables, eggs, cheese and nuts and salads which are important parts of the South Beach diet. These types of food are not only known to carry several nutrients in them, but also allow for you to go without being hungry or needing more than three meals a day.

By moving to the South Beach Diet, you will learn to find a balance in your nutrition and in your diet and to allow for you to change your lifestyle so that you can begin to feel healthy and take whatever measures necessary in order to lose weight and keep the fat off.