South Beach Diet or White Logic

South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor-Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss

Author: Arthur Agatston

For years, cardiologist Arthur Agaston, M.D. urged his patients to lose weight for the sake of their hearts, but every diet was too hard to follow or its restrictions were too harsh. Some were downright dangerous. Nobody seemed to be able to stick with low-fat regimens for any length of time. And a diet is useless if you can't stick with it.

So Dr. Agaston developed his own. The South Beach Diet isn't complicated, and it doesn't require that you go hungry. You'll enjoy normal-size helpings of meat, poultry, and fish. You'll also eat eggs, cheese, nuts, and vegetables. Snacks are required. You'll learn to avoid the bad carbs, like white flour, white sugar, and baked potatoes. Best of all, you'll lose that stubborn belly fat first!

Dr. Agaston's diet has produced consistently dramatic results (8 to 13 pounds lost in the first 2 weeks!) and has become a media sensation in South Florida. Now you, too, can join the ranks of the fit and fabulous with The South Beach Diet.

Publishers Weekly

Despite the glitzy title, this is one of the more appealing diet books among the new "anti-carb" programs. Agatston, a doctor based at Miami Beach's Mt. Sinai Medical Center, found that his patients not only were unable to stay on various popular diets but their cholesterol and blood sugar levels remained dangerously high after trying these plans. The doctor chose to alter his own diet-first avoiding all carbohydrates and fruit and then reintroducing these foods in moderation. Feeling better and losing weight, he then consulted a nutritionist to modify his strategy to devise a sound method for his patients. The South Beach diet begins with a somewhat restrictive two-week program, generally producing a weight loss of from eight to 13 pounds. The initial phase may be difficult for those who crave bread, pasta and fruit. But there are still choices, and snacks (cheese, hummus, vegetables) are a necessary part of the diet. People shouldn't feel hungry on this part of the diet, stresses the author. The second phase offers somewhat more choices, including whole wheat bread and other selected carbohydrates. Agatston advocates combining the "bad" with the "good." For example, take whole wheat bread and dip it into olive oil, rather than using butter. Eat a very small amount of pasta with lots of vegetables, meat and healthy oils. Complete meal plans along with simple recipes comprise roughly half the book. Of course, there's no perfect diet that works for everyone but the enthusiasm of the conversational tone and the inviting manner make the book more appealing than many other diet tomes. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Read also Maximum Fitness or Monochrome Days

White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction

Author: John William Crowley

"There are no second acts in American lives." F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous pronouncement, an epitaph for his own foreshortened career, points out a pattern of imaginative blight common to writers of the Lost Generation. As John W. Crowley shows in this engaging study, excessive drinking had a crucial effect on the frequently diminished fortunes of these writers. Indeed, the modernists - especially the men - were a decidedly drunken lot. The first extended literary analysis to take account of recent work by social historians on the temperance movement, this book examines the relationship between intoxication and addiction in American life and letters during the first half of the twentieth century. In explaining the transition from Victorian to modern paradigms of heavy drinking, Crowley focuses on representative fictions. He considers the historical formation of "alcoholism" and earlier concepts of habitual drunkenness and their bearing on the social construction of gender roles. He also defines the "drunk narrative," a mode of fiction that expresses the conjunction of modernism and alcoholism in a pervasive ideology of despair - the White Logic of John Barleycorn, London's nihilistic lord of the spirits.

Booknews

Crowley (English, Syracuse U.) examines the relationship between intoxication and addiction in American life and letters during the first half of the 20th century. He focuses on representative fictions by authors such as W.D. Howells, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, defines the "drunk narrative," and considers the historical formation of alcoholism and earlier concepts of habitual drunkenness and their bearing on the social construction of gender roles. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)