With so much controversy over low carb diets, it’s hard to know what to believe. If you’ve always wanted to lower your carbs, but were scared off by the Atkins diet, you should definitely look into the South Beach Diet.

The South Beach Diet isn’t low carb — well, not exactly! It’s what I call a “lower carb” diet. You do eat less carbs, but you’re eating a lot less of those nasty, bad carbs that made you gain weight in the first place!

Don’t worry if you don’t know a bad carb from a good carb. The South Beach Diet works by telling you exactly what carbs are good for you. You don’t even have to count calories! You just follow their simple list of foods to eat, and make sure that you eat until you’re satisfied. This definitely isn’t the kind of diet where you need to starve yourself. (You know that’s the wrong way to lose weight, right?)

And the diet keeps things super simple by breaking the plan into 3 easy phases:

Phase I - Cut the Sugar, Cut the Cravings

I call Phase I the Craving Buster phase! For two weeks, you eliminate the worst of the bad carbs from your diet: sugar. You’ll be amazed at how your body responds to less sugar! No more cravings, no more sluggish afternoons, or feeling drained and tired. Add that to the weight you’ll be losing, and you’ll wonder why you didn’t start the South Beach Diet sooner.

Phase II - Keep on Losing Weight

Phase II lasts as long as you have weight to lose. You start adding in more good carbs — one at time — and just keep an eye on how you’re feeling and how much weight you’re losing. You’ll learn what foods work for you and which ones don’t.

Phase III — Lose Fat Forever

Phase III is simply a maintenance phase. By this time, you’ve lost all the weight you wanted to lose and you feel great; it’s just a matter of eating the foods that make you feel healthy and energized… for life!

Bottom line, the best way to get started with the South Beach Diet is to check out SouthBeachDiet.com.. It’s the official site, and it has everything you need to know about the diet right at your fingertips.

Meal Planner

This is THE key feature of South Beach Diet Online that helped me when I first started out. If your current meals are made up of mostly bad carbs, you’re going to need an idea of what to eat. South Beach Diet Online. has plenty of ideas, and lots of delicious, easy-to-make recipes. Seriously, “dieting” has never tasted this good…

On top of the meal planner, the site has tons of snazzy tools:

• Shopping List Generator (pick your meals, generate the list and go food shopping)
• Guides on Dining Out and Fast Foods (you’ll know what to eat in these situations — no excuses!)
• An extremely active forum/support group (with very enthusiastic members, and many of them have been members for years — which means tons of tips, advice and encouragement)
• Weight Tracker (lets you know how well you’re doing with regular weigh-ins)
• Video workouts (for all levels)
• And so much more — nutrition counseling with trained dietitians, vegetarian menu, online journal, cooking tips and daily e-mails with your personal menu, tips and news.

Cost

As I write this, SouthBeachDiet.com. is offering a free 1 week trial. You can check it out without any risk: if it’s not right for you, simply cancel your subscription. After the free one week trial, it’s just $5 week, billed quarterly. But you can cancel your subscription any time after 4 weeks and get a refund. So, that’s a 4 week/$20.00 minimum after the free trial — plenty of time to find out if the diet is right for you. That comes out to around $0.71 cents a day. Definitely worth the price of admission.

Click Here to Learn More About SouthBeachDiet.com — and Get Your Free 1 Week Trial