It’s one more thing people have had to worry about since Hurricane Katrina – losing weight. Dr. Neil Baum, a local urologist, said he knows about staying healthy but the storm changed something.

Baum said he’d never been overweight before, but knew he needed do something.

“Heard about the Birmingham Diet; that you can lose a lot of weight quickly and I did give it a try and within just a few days I was able to lose 3 or 4 pounds,” Baum said.

He said the Birmingham Diet promises a 3 to 5 pound loss in the first 10 days and—for some—a 30 pound loss in 40 days.

The 3 meal-a-day plan is followed exactly for the first 3 days, then your normal meals for the next 4 days, continuing this weekly alternating pattern until you reach your goal.

And the foods you eat are everything from toast to peanut butter, vegetables, fruit, eggs, ice cream and cheese, and many kinds of meat including hot dogs. According to Baum, the best part was that he didn't feel hungry or deprived.

“Usually I have one of the cravings for food about 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the afternoon and using this diet I found that I didn't have that,” Baum said.

Dr. Melinda Sothern, LSU Health Sciences Center Diet and Fitness Expert, questions not only the healthy connections with the ‘Birmingham Diet’ as well as the program’s overall credibility.

“The individuals who are advertising it on the website are trying to give credibility to it by saying it's associated with the University of Birmingham, but in fact it's not,” Sothern said. “And there was a very strong letter on the web site from the University of Birmingham saying that they do not recommend this diet.”

Sothern said the diet was too high in saturated fat and too low in carbohydrates. She believes it could cause a dangerous drop in potassium and said it forces you to lose mostly water at first, causing dehydration.

“The reason why you lose weight quickly is because the combination of foods is actually only 1,200 calories a day, so you can actually reduce your caloric intake to 1,200 without having to go so drastic to certain types of foods,” Sothern said.

She also questions the diet’s source of protein, such as hot dogs.

“Unfortunately, the foods that they recommend are high in saturated fat, so none of us in the medical field understand why they can say it's a diet to improve heart disease risk,” Sothern said.

Eating lean protein in the diet is paramount, as is exercise, according to Sothern. Without those two you will lose the very thing that keeps you thin, muscle mass.

Exercise is exactly what Baum does every day. He works out his heart and helps fat loss through aerobic exercise and builds fat burning muscle through weight and resistance training. He agreed with Sothern about the fact that it's the drop in calories that's helping him, and he drinks lots of water to counteract dehydration, but he said this diet helped just for the short term to get back to his old healthful eating and workout lifestyle.