Anyone Here on the South Beach Diet 5226

"Meat" has traditionally been seen as beef and pork only. Fowl and seafood aren't considered meat by many. I can see someone becoming what is known as a pesco-pollo-vegetarian, and eating seafood and fowl, so I don't know why you're listing it as something that's "weird".

Diets are fads. You have to keep in mind that much of what we're told is biased. The diet industry is a billion-dollar one which has to constantly reinvent itself. A few years ago it was all about "fat burners", and you couldn't watch a minute of television without seeing ads for pills that supposedly burned fat or made it leave your body so quickly it wasn't absorbed. Of course, those pills didn't work, so the industry was ready to embrace a new diet -- low-carb/Atkins. Now that low-carb has gotten some deserved bad press, the new fad is high-priced pills with some miracle ingredient that reduces stress-enduced fat (or menopause induced fat, or whatever). A few people have been bright enough to admit that each person will need a different kind of diet. Andrew Weil's books, while focused on vegetarianism, at least bring up good points about how no one fad diet is going to help the entire human race. Face it, we live in huge, sprawling cities and can't walk anywhere anymore. Gyms are depressing and expensive. Fresh fruits and veggies and lean cuts of meat (at least here) are more expensive than processed canned stuff. Our jobs force us to work 50+ hour weeks, people with kids are running everywhere for activities, there's our own hobbies we want to engage in, and we often don't spend time cooking because we're overwhelmed and tired. It's no wonder we're getting larger, yet thanks to the diet industry, all we manage to do is make large people feel bad about themselves. There's precious little common sense advice out there at all.

Stacia