Slim Fast Diet
Perhaps the easiest diet to understand, meal replacement diets, like Slim Fast and its Costco equivalent requires very little understanding, but requires a lot of control. The potential to lose weight is one of the highest, if you are looking for good short term diet for losing a small amount of weight. For example, if you are willing to replace two meals with Slim Fast, choosing to lose about 5 lbs as a target weight loss goal in a couple weeks is very reasonable.
Where is the catch? Slim Fast drinks have 220 calories, and the famous saying “Shake for breakfast, shake for lunch, anything for dinner” is not accurate if you were to chow down on a 2000 calorie dinner, right before falling asleep. One can be particularly ravenous when dinner rolls around and you have only had 440 calories up to that point. This is why the key to this diet is to eat snacks in between, with fruits and vegetables.
Although meal replacements are generally formulated to include most the vitamins and minerals that your body requires, they will not always cover all of the vitamins and mineral and eventually will miss some. At the end of the day, there is no real replacement for real foods.
Another concern is that, as soon as you are off of the Slim Fast diet, you will go back to the same weight, gaining back everything you have lost. Because it is so simple, you don’t have to learn how to correctly proportion regular meals when you are done with the morning shakes. For this reason Slim Fast has added the Optima Plan.
Exercise
The Slim Fast Diet appears to highlight exercise just as much as the food aspect of the diet. Just as the meals are personalized, it aims at personalizing activities to suit preferences and lifestyles also. Again this is aiming at successfully integrating exercise into lifestyles rather it becoming a tiresome task.
Diary
The online diary/journal is an important tool for tracking your progress, nutritional intake, activities and your mental state of mind. There is a very basic format for the online diary and the option to use a more detailed one. Either way, it's an important tool because it can help a dieter establish patterns they may fall into. It can help a person to pinpoint reasons they may decide not to exercise, or types of foods they ate which resulted in them wanting to snack afterwards.
Community
Any attempt to lose weight loss will be far more likely to succeed with a support network. Slim Fast provides a support network with its online community that allows users to communicate with others who are going through the same struggles and those who have overcome those struggles. It is a place that dieters can find understanding and answers to any questions or problems they may be having with the process. This can also be done anonymously.
Overall, Slim Fast can help you meet a target weight loss goal in a hurry. But the risk of gaining the weight back and the nature of the beast leave little room for the Slim Fast diet being considered a healthy diet that can last a lifetime with long lasting health benefits. It probably should not be used as a lifestyle changer.