“When dieting, things aren’t as simple as choosing what and what not to eat. There is a need for a complete lifestyle change for any form of diet to be effective.” So said Lei de Leon, a lawyer who has been on the South Beach Diet (SBD) since October 2004 – a fact she is proud of, having shed 36 pounds, downing her weight from 152 to 116 pounds.

Lifestyle change for de Leon means she had to stop eating rice altogether. “This is hard for a Filipino, because our food usually requires rice,” she said. “But it’s all worth it.”

Diet for the obese

SBD, developed by Dr. Arthur Agatston, director of the Mount Sinai Cardiac Prevention Center in Miami Beach, Florida in the mid-1990s, started to get chronically overweight heart patients get their diets under control to prevent or reverse the onslaught of heart and vascular problems associated with obesity. Since his patients were not doing well on the standard, low-fat American Heart Association diet, Agatston investigated diets and the origins of insulin resistance on his own, resulting to the development of SBD.

With the release of the New York Times bestseller The South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor-Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss, SBD became the next “in” diet.

Phasing the diet

SBD is divided into three different phases, with each phase including specific meal plans and recipes.

The first phase, lasting for two weeks, is the strictest phase. With the goal of eating three balanced meals a day, and to eat enough so as not to feel hungry all the time, dieters are encouraged to eat normal-sized helpings of chicken, turkey, fish, vegetables, nuts, cheese, and eggs. Strict compliance guarantees weight loss of 8-13 pounds, so many willingly give up rice, bread, pasta, crackers, ice cream, fruits and fruit juices, whole or low-fat milk, soy, ham, veal, and yogurt. Decreasing the consumption of these is expected to help better the metabolism and improve insulin resistance, leading to weight loss.

This is the phase people identify with the expenses, de Leon said. “People who say SBD is expensive see the 1,000-peso home-delivered SBD meal ads. If it’s P1,000 a day, multiplied by 14 days, that’s P14,000, which is a lot because most people don’t earn that in a month, much more in 14 days, in the Philippines.”

Strictly adhering to the listed choices is subject to individual decisions. “What you need to learn is to find a substitute,” de Leon said. “Like they have turkey in SBD menus in the USA, but here, you can find substitutes like chicken. Just as long as you are aware of what you can eat, and what you can’t eat, then you can survive on SBD.”

The second phase, lasting until the weight loss goal is achieved, is more liberal, with re-introduction of some of the banned foods from the first phase, such as baked goods, potatoes, banana, pineapple, watermelon, and honey. Weight loss slows from 1-2 pounds per week.

Supposedly, the first phase “re-boots” the body, switching an “off” button inside the dieter from consuming bad foods. By the second phase, the switch stays “off”, thus the lack of craving for the bad foods stays (much like Ivan Pavlov’s conditioning).

The third phase is the weight maintenance. “This is what you are supposed to be doing for the rest of your life,” de Leon said. “It’s the lifestyle change that you should undergo.”

The will to diet

De Leon started gaining weight after passing the Bar Exam nine years ago. “There wasn’t that much stress (after graduating from UP Diliman),” she joked. Practicing as a lawyer, whose job she described as sedentary, and aging, which slows the body’s metabolism, contributed to de Leon’s gaining weight.

“So I wanted to lose weight. I wanted to look good. I wanted to have the self-confidence to wear what I want,” de Leon said. “At the time when I started SBD, I was aiming for something, I wanted something to come out of it. And since I had a motivation, for me it wasn’t hard.”

What was harder was the application of the usual diets, “those that seemed easy to follow” but which yo-yo. “For a moment you lose the weight you want to, and then another moment you gain back what you lost,” she said.

SBD has helped boost de Leon’s confidence, not to mention reining her earlier problems of high blood pressure, hypertension, and high cholesterol.

“I’m sure SBD will be replaced by another type of diet soon, for that’s how diets go,” de Leon said. “But SBD is a lifestyle change, so once you’ve been on it, you already have that training to know what food to avoid, and what food is good for you. So you should be able to maintain it.”