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The New Beverly Hills Diet

This diet centers on "conscious combining". Eating the right foods at the right time.

 

What is the new Beverly Hills Diet

The original Beverly Hills Diet began with a very restrictive 42-day initiation phase. The new one gives up many of the earlier extremes, and now, according to its author, meets recommended standards for a balanced weekly diet.

Note the phrase "balanced weekly diet." As far as Judy Mazel is concerned, our dietary troubles began when we adopted a 3-square-meals-a-day plan, and they'd soon be over if we stopped combining carbohydrates with proteins, proteins with carbohydrates, and fruit with anything.

"It isn't what you eat or how much you eat that makes you fat," maintains Mazel, a dietary and lifestyle counselor, "it is when you eat and what you eat together!"

The original The Beverly Hills Diet was a book that was read in one or two sittings and was referred back to as a guide. The New Beverly Hills Diet is a day-to-day support system, a hand-holding guide you interact with each day.

The New Beverly Hills Diet is not a diet; it's a lifestyle eating plan, a plan that focuses on the individual adoption of the technique of Conscious Combining, the technique that Judy Mazel first introduced in The Beverly Hills Diet in 1981.

The original The Beverly Hills Diet began with 10 days of fruit and did not include animal protein until day 19. The New Beverly Hills Diet includes foods from all food groups in the first week, including animal protein, meeting all standards set by the U.S. Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs as recommended for a balanced weekly diet.

Mazel maintains that you can expect a 10- to 15-pound loss in the program's 35-day initiation phase.

 

 

 

How does it work

The Beverly Hills Diet encourages the "food combining" or separating certain foods, theoretically allowing the body to properly digest each food. A mixture of foods leads to "confused" enzymes, the author claims. At the beginning of the 35 day diet plan, calories can range wildly based on the all you can eat principle for certain foods. The Plan recommends eating fruit by itself and never eating protein with carbohydrates in order for food to be properly digested and not stored as body fat.

 

What you can eat

• In the new Beverly Hills Diet, proteins go with proteins (and fats), carbohydrates go with carbohydrates (and fats), and fruit stands alone.

  The day begins with any one of about a dozen enzymatic fruits, such as pineapple, strawberries, grapes, papaya, watermelon, mango, kiwi, persimmon, prunes, apricots or figs.

  Enjoy the fruit you choose without limit, but wait up to one hour before switching from one fruit to another, and two hours before eating carbohydrates, fats, or protein. Once you do eat from one of these other groups, you don't eat any more fruit for the rest of the day.

  If the next thing you eat after the fruit is a carbohydrate, you can eat carbs without restriction until you consume protein. Once you have even a little protein, 80% of everything you eat for the rest of the day must be protein.

• Fats such as butter, oil, mayonnaise, sour cream and heavy cream can be combined with either proteins or carbohydrates, but not with fruit.

• Eliminate diet sodas, artificial sweeteners, diet products that contain artificial sweeteners and artificial additives, nondairy creamer and margarine. Limit, if not eliminate, any foods with artificial additives.

• Most alcoholic beverages are carbohydrates (beer, bourbon, rum, vodka, scotch, tequila) and should, for the most part, be consumed only with carbohydrates; wine is a fruit and can be combined with other fruits; champagne is neutral and goes with anything.

• One meal a day can be considered "open," where carbs and protein freely fraternize: Burgers with fries, for example, or shrimp with rice. However, if that open meal occurs at lunch, once again 80% of the food you eat for the rest of the day should be strictly protein.

 

What health experts say

The only benefit seen with this strict and sometimes confusing food plan is it is an extremely low calorie intake and therefore you will lose weight. Science reveals that the digestive tract was designed to handle all sorts of different food mixtures. The plan is monotonous and food combining diet plans are not established as an effective weight loss method.

A spokesman for the American Dietetic Association, had this to say: "This diet is really promoting itself as a weight loss program -- and it would do that. Sustaining the diet, however, would be a concern because of a lack of nutritional adequacy. The reason people lose weight on the Beverly Hills Diet program is that overall, they are eating less calories, not due to the effects of food combining."

 

 

 

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