The New Beverly Hills Diet: It is Not What You Eat, but Where You Shop

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The New Beverly Hills diet is an update on an older diet of the same name. This plan suggests that we all need to make more conscious food choices because it is not what you are eating, how much of it you are eating or when you eat it, but what foods you eat with what. (You might call it a sort of food discrimination).

If you are a huge fan of getting positive reinforcement, like to have a lot of affirmations and have a real affinity for fruits, this might be the right diet plan for you. If you believe that food unity is the only way that there will be peace in the food pyramid forever and ever, this is not the plan for you because the basic premise is simple: you eat protein with protein (and fats), carbohydrates with carbohydrates (and fats) but the fruit stands alone.

How to Prepare for the New Beverly Hills Diet Plan
You have to get your head wrapped around a diet plan that includes and counts wine and other alcoholic beverages as part of a food group and declares that champagne is a neutral thing and can "go with anything". (I beg to differ! Champagne does not go with Lucky Charms cereal).

If you really want to live the Beverly Hills style en route to this diet plan, start stuffing the family pooch in your purse and lugging it everywhere you go. All of those icy glares you are getting stems from sheer jealousy. And think what an upper body workout you are getting.

The Plan Itself
In a nutshell, the New Beverly Hills Diet Plan is just a little complicated. You start your day with one of twelve different fruits which are listed as high enzyme. On the list: pineapples, strawberries and grapes among others. You can enjoy all of the fruit you would like, but you must wait for an hour before you switch types. Okay, so you grab a pint of strawberries and eat them right to the bottom of the container but are still hungry. After an hour you can start eating a new fruit type or if you would prefer, you wait an additional hour ( 2 hours in all) and eat a carbohydrate or a protein. Regardless of what you choose, you can eat those foods without limits, at least until, you eat the other. After you eat the next choice, all of your foods will come from that group.

To recap: first variety of fruits without limit, one hour then another variety, again without limit. Or, have some fruit, wait two hours and then have some carbohydrates. However, that means that your fruit for the day is ended.

One meal per day is open, meaning that you can eat foods in any combination that you choose. Wine and fruit juices count as fruit, all other alcohols are carbohydrates and champagne is neutral.

The Pros The diet does encourage fruits, and unlike many other diet plans does make some concessions for alcohol. The weight loss that is promised on the diet plan is slow and steady, rather than outlandish, with 10-15 pounds in 35 days being suggested as average.

The Cons
The diet rests on a theory that just does not hold water (or champagne if you prefer). Supposedly, food is not what makes us fat but rather, slow digesting foods and confused enzymes. The theory holds that fruit is self digesting and creates its own enzymes making it largely digested and ready to give up its nutrients in about twenty minutes. Other carbohydrates (because fruit is a mini-carb) can take up to three hours for full digestion and sometimes even longer. (The advice given is chew, chew, chew although not many diet plans ever suggest that you stuff a whole potato down your gullet and hope for the best).

A protein, usually the darling of the dieting world can take up to ten hours to digest. The problem the plan contends is when the faster digesting foods get stuck in the digestive line behind the slower ones, like when we eat them altogether. (You know, like normal people will so often do).

There is no medical evidence or clinical trials to back any of this theory up, nor is there any support to the idea of food combining being either good or bad. You will possibly lose weight, but because you are eating less food overall and not because of the notion of food grouping.

Exercise is not recommended, although it is considered to be a "good idea".

Resources for The New Beverly Hills Diet