The South Beach Diet is a personalized online diet designed to help you eat right and lose weight. The South Beach Diet™ teaches you to change the balance of food you eat to emphasize health and weight-loss!You’ll eat good fats and good carbs and avoid bad carbs and bad fats.

Developed by renowned cardiologist Dr. Arthur Agatston, the South Beach Diet is a clinically tested weight-loss program with hundreds of delicious recipes, flexible guidelines on eating out, and advice on how to shop for healthy and wholesome ingredients.

During the first two weeks, the South Beach diet eliminates most carbs.

In Phase 2, unlike the Atkins diet, you can gradually start eating healthy carbs, including most fruits, whole grains and dairy products. You should avoid processed carbs such as bagels, cookies, cornflakes, regular pasta, rice cakes, carrots, corn, bananas, raisins, pineapple, fruit juice and watermelon. You follow this phase until you reach your weight goals. In Phase 3, the diet recommends that you mostly eat the same foods as in Phase 2. If you overindulge and regain weight, you can go back to Phase 1 for a week or two

The program reduces or eliminates foods with a high glycemic index - which measures the rise in blood sugar after eating a particular food. The diet corrects the way your body reacts to the foods that made you overweight, especially sugar. But to lose weight, the bottom line is still calories, not the glycemic index.”

Promised weight loss: Eight- to 13- pound loss in the first two weeks; about one to two pounds per week after that. Belly fat will disappear first.

You don’t count calories, but based on serving sizes and ingredients provided in sample menus and recipes, intake in all phases runs about 1,200 to 1,400 calories daily, if you eat reasonable portions.

This calorie level should produce weight loss of about a pound per week. Fat (much of it healthful fat from salmon and olive oil) provides 40 to 50 percent of calories, higher than the 30 percent or less recommended by low-fat diets and the American Heart Association.

According to the Healthy Eating Index, Phase 1 of the South Beach may fall short on fruit and grains, and may have too much saturated fat, but hits the mark on milk, vegetables, meat, cholesterol and variety.

Phase 2 may still skimp on grains and some dairy products and may have too much cholesterol because of eggs. But Phase 2 scores well on vegetables, fruit, meat, saturated fat, sodium and variety. Men may need more vegetables.

Exercise is not needed to lose weight on the South Beach Diet but exercise always helps you lose weight.

Start losing weight now!