Book Review: The South Beach Diet Dining Guide

South Beach Diet author Dr. Arthur Agatston has designed a guide to help people on that diet when dining out, but it could also be useful for others on a different weight loss diet or low carb plan, or who just want to eat a more nutritious diet. It would be most useful to people who enjoy eating in, and have access to, chain restaurants.

There’s no doubt about it, people are eating out more than ever before, and it can be challenging to stay on an eating plan when you have less control over the ingredients. In this guide for South Beach dieters, the introductory section has both general tips for following the diet when dining out and short sections focused on various types of restaurants, e.g. pizza, Italian, Japanese, “event eating” such as baseball games and many more. The second section has descriptions of 76 different chain restaurants and recommendations for what to eat on each menu. The third section focuses on the business traveler, with 5 different upscale restaurants in each of 15 different U.S. cities. Since the South Beach Diet emphasizes eating low in saturated fat and refined carbohydrate, the recommendations would work for people on many different healthful diet plans.

The recommendations are very sensible (for examples, see this excerpt), but I’m not sure how much people need to hear them repeated in various combinations for different restaurants. Still, I know that a lot of people feel comfort in getting specific advice, and for those who eat out at a lot of chain restaurants the recommendations for each restaurant would probably be helpful. For those who feel able to take basic suggestions such as those in the original South Beach Diet or other diet books and apply them for themselves, however, this might not be money well-spent.