Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I have been struggling with weight loss my entire life. I have gained and lost weight throughout the years doing different things such as low-fat diets, no carb diets, diet pills, diet teas and so on and so forth. While these methods worked for a while, I eventually gained all of the weight back.

I have to say that for a short while, I did keep the weight off, until I gave birth to my four year old son. I managed to gain approximately 40 pounds during my pregnancy. My excuse back then was that I was 40 years old and losing weight at 40 is harder than when you are in your twenties.

Once again, I was working out to no avail, drinking diet teas and trying old diets that worked when I was younger. I was beginning to get depressed with the weight gain. At this point, I decided that the best thing I could do was accept that this was the way I would probably look for the rest of my life.

Then, a co-worker of mine decided she wanted to lose weight before her wedding. She introduced me to the South Beach Diet.

The one thing that I should point out is that according to the author, you can lose weight even without exercise. Exercising will increase the number of pounds you can lose, but is not necessary to see results. I tested this out, and did indeed lose weight after I stopped exercising (not that I am suggesting you should not exercise); but thought I would share that piece of information.

Another fun fact that I learned from the book was that fiber taken 15 minutes before a meal, lowered your blood sugar level. This is something to be mindful of if you're eating too many carbs in a day. The theory behind the South Beach diet is that too many bad carbs will cause a surge in your blood sugar level, causing you to gain weight.

So what I would do, fifteen minutes before eating a food such as rice, is to drink a teaspoonful of Metamucil (sugar free) with water 15 minutes before having the rice. As a result, this would lower the amount of carbs in that food. Pretty neat huh!!!! Again, you do not have to do this, this is just a tip that offered by the author.

As a result of learning everything I needed to know and completing all of the phases as outlined in the book, I lost the 40 pounds and continue to drop weight (without trying).

Needless to say, my co-worker who simply searched for the basic information over the Internet is still struggling to lose the weight. P.S. she has been on phase 1 for four months and hit a plateau after the first month.

I think that the most important thing to point out is that I continue to eat healthy and LOVE everything that I consume. Even after I reached my goal, I am still losing a pound a week. I think that's huge considering that I was struggling prior to this