I found a little online handbook for South Beach Diet for everyone’s reference.
From what I’m seeing it seems like their Phase 1 diet guidelines would work fairly well. While that phase does allow cheese and nuts, something we don’t add in the P3toLife program until week 3, what’s good about it is that is have very clear portion sizes that match what we would do in week 3 – ¼ cup or 2 tbsp type stuff- for plain nuts and cheese crumbles etc, this is a good amount (except for the nut butters – they allows 2 tbsp for a serving, but that’s 200 calories – just for 2 tbsp of something! Not enough food for the calories folks. You’ll be back looking to snack more and then overeat).
The protein serving sizes are listed as 3 oz, which is less protein per meal than P3toLife has, so the overall calories in South Beach Diet has a slightly higher fat ratio. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means you’ll have a little less volume of food with that diet than with P3toLife, and if that’s okay with you and you don’t need/want larger meals, then this is just fine.
Phase 1 of South Beach doesn’t allow any fruits at all, and you can certainly do this – in fact if you don’t have a structured plan to follow, I do recommend eliminating them almost entirely or just small amounts of berries in my free guide to P3 blogpost. However, in P3toLife, because it’s well structured, we actually do include small amounts of fruit because it’s all nicely calculated out, and this works really great and it’s just nice having that flavor and texture of a little fruit in your life.
When we look at Phase 2 of South Beach, things start to not match up as well for P3 – now they are allowing grains, beans, and high carb vegetables. Even though they have a specific portion size, we really do need to avoid these items entirely in p3 of the hCG Diet from what we’ve seen.
If you avoided those things and had larger protein servings from that phase of South Beach, that might work for you. For Phase 4 though this may be fine as long as the portion sizes are accounted for.
I hope this helps you figure out if you want to try it. Mostly if you go with higher protein/medium fat/lower carb that can go a long way in helping you do well.
