South Beach Diet

So I decided to try the South Beach diet, since it embodies most of the principles I was thinking about trying anyway...now I just have a title for what I'm doing. :-) I had heard mostly good things about the South Beach Diet for a couple of years but never looked into it until this point because I figured, with a trendy name like "South Beach Diet," it must be some unhealthy fad diet. But I read the book, and it seems to make sense.

There are three phases of the South Beach Diet...I am starting with phase one, which eliminates grains/starches, fruits, and pretty much all sugars (lactose in dairy products is considered okay) for two weeks. I have read in several places that a nursing mom really shouldn't do phase one, and instead go directly to stage two, but I think that is probably for lactating mothers of young infants. Baby Boy is almost ten months old and is getting a lot of his nutrition from solid foods at this point. Plus, I am eating lots of protein and plenty of calories, so I don't think my milk will dry up.

I don't miss bread at all. I do miss my morning bowl of oatmeal, and I miss fruit. But I know the deprivation is only for two weeks, and then I can start adding things back in. I have been following the diet for a couple of days, and I feel really good. I am realizing that grains might have a tendency to produce bloating and gas in me (I know it would probably help if I diligently soaked my grains as a good Nourishing Traditions devotee should), because I have had a marked decrease in these annoyances since I stopped eating grains. I am feeling less sluggish, and I have had a lot of energy. I think my stomach has gotten a little flatter.

Updated to add: Oh, yeah, another thing that has motivated me to change my eating habits is an episode I had about two weeks ago. I woke up in the middle of the night with terrible, horrible stomach cramps. I mean, they were so bad, they woke me up out of a deep sleep. It felt like I was in labor, except the pain was steady instead of coming in waves, like contractions. I honestly thought I must be pregnant without knowing it and was having a miscarriage. But after about fifteen minutes of me moaning and crying and writhing, the pain subsided, and I was able to drift back to sleep. In the morning, I was absolutely fine. I figured out that I wasn't pregnant, so to this day, I don't know if it was just bad menstrual cramps or related to something I ate, but man, I don't want to experience that again.