Jello - Happy to hear that the Dr. visit went so well. I'm glad you got your six weeks. Recovery is so much more than being able to walk around! You deserve to have time to get your health back up, too.
Faye - free exercise equipment - yahoo! Now all you need is some spandex to avoid the chafe.
Tiger - I don't know this "what not to wear"? Maybe you could come and tell me what not to wear? And take me shopping too?
Turns out DH was too 'out of it' to be able to find the SoB book the other night (didn't expect me to want something on the best seller rack, which is untypical for me) but I went to the bookstore myself... Looking at it at home for the 5 minutes I had to myself (sigh) what I saw that was different from Atkins was that UNsaturated fats ONLY are stressed.
Now the reasoning stressed in the book is that when a person eats a meal heavy in saturated fats there is a temporary condition in the arterial walls called 'somethin' that makes it more susceptible to... gunk. And so under the WRONG kind of conditions a meal heavy in saturated fats could bring on a heart attack... this temporary condition that happens bringing on the final straw as it were.
So, without doing any more reading than that yet... It seems on the surface that the South Beach diet is like Atkins with training wheels? Safer... but not as maneuverable because it's got more forbidden foods?
The guy who wrote the book IS a cardiologist, so I can see why he would write a diet more suitable for heart patients - people with preexisting conditions that might make high doses of saturated fats dangerous in the short-term. However, being with my Dad last night he said he saw on the news how the Adkins diet has LOWERED cholesterol, so the Adkins diet is not necessarily heart UN-friendly in the LONGER term like so many people thought for YEARS (which pretty much ticks them off.) What the SoB cardiologist (yea I still think it's funny.) seems to want to rule out is shorter-term dangers, IMHO.
Now considering how long people actually tend to stay on diets for (I can safely say not long term), and how many Americans have lifestyle-related factors that are already heading them down the heart disease highway... maybe that isn't such a bad idea to be cautious about short term effects of saturated fats??
The impression I'm getting (having done a little skimming in Adkins) is that a short stint on Adkins could admittedly be LESS than beneficial for heart health, while a longer stint would trend back toward bringing those [cholesterol/arterial plaque] risk factors back down lower than pevious levels.
Where the SoB diet is a more cautious type of thing that would not add any evil.
So um, Adkins with training wheels. Now interestingly the Fat Flush Plan (which I have done in brief stints before more like a detox) is an "unsaturated fats ONLY but plenty of them, and lots of nice lean proteins while elminating all bad carbohydrates and eating good veggies" diet. SoB seems pretty similar so far, although a little more mainstreamed as the original FFP was pretty stark and health-nutty (believe me).
Personally, I think I'd rather do the diet that lets me eat as much bacon as I want.
But as I said I didn't have any time to myself last night, what with visiting a grand opening of a wellness clinic that DH designed out by my folks' house and hanging out with the folks for the evening. So I have not studied this and will make my decision later. It might be worth a trip to the Dr. to find out if I'm actually in good enough shape do do Adkins or if I should stick to the more conservative SoB. It might actually be that I've got the 2 diets pegged wrong, also. <disclaimer> But I'm armed with books and dangerous, that much I know.