Dr. Arthur Agatston is a practicing cardiologist and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. A pioneer in the field of noninvasive cardiac imaging, Dr. Agatston’s scientific work resulted in the Agatston Score, which is now used throughout the world. While he is known publicly as the author of the best selling book, The South Beach Diet, Dr. Agatston actually created his balanced approach to healthy eating in order to help his patients whose weight and blood chemistries were not improving on a standard low-fat diet. Today, the South Beach Diet has become a lifestyle approach to healthy eating for millions of Americans and people worldwide. Dr. Agatston's most recent publication: The South Beach Diet Supercharged: Faster Weight Loss and Better Health for Life, a New York Times BestSeller.

Guest Blogger Arthur Agatston--

Top Tip: If you want to lose weight and keep it off, never skip meals.

You’d be surprised at how many people think that the best way to lose weight is to skip a meal now and then. A phenomenon I've noticed among overweight people—especially women, for some reason—is that many of them skip breakfast. It's not even necessarily an attempt to save on calories. They say they just don't like eating first thing in the morning.

What happens when you skip breakfast, lunch, or dinner, is that your blood sugar drops, causing you to feel hungrier. This hunger often leads to cravings for refined starches and sugars—the potato chips, candy bars, Danishes, and cookies, for example, that I like to call the “bad” carbs.

The problem is that when you replace a “meal” with a snack of nearly pure starch or sugar, your pancreas (a small flat organ that lies behind your stomach) has to produce more insulin than it normally does. (Insulin is the hormone that facilitates the movement of blood sugar and fat from the bloodstream into your cells.) Once that additional insulin kicks in, your blood sugar falls abruptly. And that’s when you reach again for those bad carbs. Although you may feel satisfied and energized for a while after eating a sugary or starchy snack, it doesn’t take long for your sugar high to rapidly become a sugar low. And as your blood sugar drops, you’re hungry again and in search of another quick fix to relieve your food cravings. It’s an unhealthy cycle that leads to weight gain not weight loss.

That’s why I tell dieters to never skip meals—or healthy snacks—even when they don’t feel hungry. On the South Beach Diet, we recommend eating three meals a day and at least two snacks, consisting of nutrient-rich, high fiber carbohydrates, such as vegetables, fruits, legumes, and whole grains; lean sources of protein; good unsaturated fats and low-fat dairy. Why eat snacks? They’re just as important as meals for stabilizing your blood sugar and keeping you from overeating at mealtime.

So, instead of starving yourself one moment and stuffing yourself the next, allow your body to reach a steady state somewhere in between. Once your body begins to adjust to a moderated blood-sugar level—as opposed to the frequent blood-sugar fluctuations of someone skipping meals—you’ll find that you’ll rarely be hungry, your cravings will have subsided, and your weight loss will go much more smoothly.

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Update on Jun 16, 2008 by At Basil & Spice

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