The Complete and Easy Reference for All Your Favorite Foods

"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.

"Complete and Easy Reference"? No way. I would think if a publisher releases an e-book at a higher price than their printed version they could at least spend some effort making it appropriate for a digital reader? The charts are all hopelessly small and broken up - so you can't see all types of a the same food-type alongside each other. Each bit of chart needs to be increased in size and then its blurred. Why no simple A-Z of foods anyway? I was hoping for something on my tablet that would serve as a quick guide to what to buy. But this book is a trial to read.

This book was in awesome condition. Was glad it was in good shape. However, No to current resident on the address for deliver. My name and the current resident. this was purchased for me, my name should have been the only one on address label. But, I did get it.

Excellent reference for choosing the healthiest foods for your body, is completely revised and includes food not in the first book. For anyone seriously considering eating healthy and at the same time losing weight, this is your bible, to be read often. The Doctor who created this diet and reference book took in consideration, the heart patients and diebetics. I have been on this diet for 5 months, and have gone through a complete lifestyle change. I recommend this book to anyone, who will take the time to write a list of foods they enjoy from the list and then proceed to buy and implement them. You will benefit greatly from the purchase of this book.

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 South Beach Diet Good Fats/Good Carbs Guide (Revised): The Complete and Easy Reference for All Your Favorite Foods
This is one of the best books I have ever bought. It is easy to use. There is so much information in it. I just love it. It is a five star product. I have gotten 4 of them to give to others. It is G-R-E-A-T. It is an easy read, no crazy words or hard to follow chapters. It is simple and straight to the point. You can eat everything but junk food.
Features it contains:
1. Food lists that are easily read with detailed info. such as portions, fats, carbs, etc so you can plan meals accordingly.
2. Explanations in a few short pages that are clear.
3. Restaurant guidelines so you can eat out.
4. An index to help you find everything in the book
5. Designed small so you can carry it with you-best feature of all!!! No more guessing.

This is a handy little reference for those following the South Beach Diet; particularly phase 3 of the plan. A slightly-oversized paperback (5 X 7 inches), it is not exactly pocket-sized, but still easily portable to the grocery store. The book dedicates about 20 pages to a summary of the South Beach Diet plan, and the rest of the book is made up of reference tables listing the carb, sugar, and fat contents of various foods. Each food is then categorized as "good," "limited," or "avoid." I do wish the author had included saturated fat content of the foods, which is why I award it 4 stars instead of 5. Only the total fat content is given. Overall, though, the 1200+ food listing is a good one to have at the store or a restaurant. The brief dining-out guide at the end is also handy.

This guide is fantastic for various reasons, as many have mentioned. My main use of it has been in connection with other cookbooks not specifically meant for the South Beach Diet. I love Italian food and have cooked out of "The Silver Spoon" for a long time. When I went on the South Beach Diet, though, I was terrified - no carbs meant no pasta! When I got my hands on this little guide, though, I was saved. Now I can flip through my Italian cookbooks and, in conjunction with this little volume, I can choose meals that fit my diet. Also, if I need to, I can use this book to replace some ingredients which may not be diet-friendly. A fantastic book and a definite winner!

If you actually READ "South Beach Diet" as a book, from start to finish, the actual diet plan comes as quite a shock. Agatson goes on and on about the magic of carb-cutting as if it's a great trick that will have minimal impact on your eating habits--then lays out a diet that is classic calorie cutting and portion-size restriction. But I give him lots of credit for the recipes, which have become part of my repertoire regardless of dieting. Great salads and dressings, especially. Recommended if you can let go of the hype and accept that to lose weight, you need to better and eat less.

To keep this short, there are many sources of information on "good fats" and "bad fats" and what foods contain "good carbs" and "bad carbs." Glycemic indexes are now realized to be extremely important for anyone who is monitoring what they eat for better lifestyle and health. If someone is fairly new to nutrition this can be helpful. There are and have been however, a plethora of these books as well as websites on the market covering this in the last few years. If you need the information it will help you, but think before you plunk down funds to buy what can be obtained for free.

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.