What is the Beverly Hills Diet?

The Beverly Hills Diet is a diet plan that was first introduced through the book The Beverly Hills Diet, by Judy Mazel. The book was published in 1981 but was revised in 1996 and called The New Beverly Hills Diet. To go along with the diet, Mazel also wrote a cookbook called The New Beverly Hills Diet Little Skinny Companion. Through these books, a person who wants to follow the Beverly Hills Diet may be able to lose weight by eating foods in a particular order and restricting the types of foods he eats at one time.

The premise of the Beverly Hills Diet is that eating different types of food together impairs digestion and causes the body to convert food to fat. By separating the fruits from the carbohydrates and the proteins from the fruits, the creator of this diet claims people can lose weight quickly. For example, advertisements for the diet claim a person can lose 20 pounds (9.07 kilograms) in little more than a month.

The original Beverly Hills Diet required a very strict change in eating. The original diet required dieters to eat only fruit for the first 10 days. Only after 19 days on the diet could a person eat an animal protein. With the current diet plan, a person may eat different types of foods from day one, as long as he does not combine them, and he may consume an animal protein on the sixth day. Some people will still find this diet very restrictive, however, as there are days on which the dieter is only supposed to consume fruit and nothing else.

A person who follows this diet is supposed to consume fruit by itself. In fact, a dieter can only consume one type of fruit at a time. On a day when other foods are allowed, a dieter is supposed to eat fruit first, as Mazel claims the order in which the food is consumed influences weight loss. After that, an individual is permitted to eat carbohydrates by themselves. Proteins are allowed after carbohydrates, but can not be combined with other foods.

On the Beverly Hills Diet, a dieter has to wait two hours before consuming a different category of food. He is not supposed to eat from a particular category of food again after moving on to the next category. If he eats fruit and then carbohydrates, he is not supposed to eat fruit again until the following day. A person on this diet can drink water, juice, alcoholic beverages, and other drinks, but may not drink diet soda or any beverage that contains an artificial sweetener.