Ok, maybe I’ve been a little too hard on the South Beach Diet. IANARD, so that’s not surprising. According to this Nutrition Action Health Letter article, it is actually a decent diet. In fact, it is one of the only diets they analyzed that is healthy and based on sound science. The only other is Weight Watchers. So maybe SBD isn’t so bad once you get over that first induction phase. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that skipping the induction phase completely won’t really harm your diet. Sure you won’t lose that initial 10-20 pounds, but in reality that is almost all water loss, anyways. I figure they threw that phase in there just to give people some immediate “oh wow!” results to keep them going onto the rest of the (IMHO, more healthy) diet. Anyhow, the article is a good read covering the 10 most popular diet books (according to Amazon), including, of course, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution.