The Inside Scoop With The Slim Fast Diet

Slim Fast and the Slim Fast diet plan have been around for more than 20 years now. Without a doubt they have become the most popular diet shake around. But does this weight loss plan really work?

The biggest benefit to replacing some of your meals with shakes is that it is really easy and takes a lot of the guesswork out of dieting. You just grab a shake for breakfast and another for lunch, so there is no need to try to plan a healthy, balanced meal or prepare food for those meals.

The Slim Fast Diet Plan

The Slim Fast plan is not difficult to follow. You have a Slim Fast shake for breakfast in the morning and another one for lunch. For dinner, the plan calls for a "sensible" meal. Sensible can mean many different things to people, but that's another story.

You can also have two pieces of fruit each day as well as one of Slim Fast's nutritional bars.
The shakes and nutritional bars can be purchased at any grocery store or Wal-Mart.

The Slim Fast diet plan also includes regular exercise and encourages you to drink 8 glasses of water a day. These are two important points and keys to success in any type of weight loss program.

Does the plan work?

The Slim Fast plan will reduce your daily calorie intake to around 1200 if you eat that sensible dinner each night. This means that anyone should lose weight with the plan.

While you can definitely lose weight with Slim Fast, there are some drawbacks. Since this is a calorie-restricted diet, you may not get enough vitamins and minerals to maintain good health. A multivitamin could help.

The reliance on making yourself a sensible dinner can also be difficult. Because you have only had 2 shakes all day, along with a piece of fruit, you're going to be hungry. It's very easy to get carried away at dinner. It will take some extra discipline to make it work.

For the most part, the bad points of dieting with shakes outweigh the good points. First, there is really no substitute for the nutrients that you get from real food. Not only does eating fresh fruit, vegetables, whole grains and lean protein give your body the nutrients that it needs, but it also forces you to learn how to eat for long term weight loss.

When you use meal replacement shakes to lose weight you aren't developing eating skills that you can use going forward in your life. As a result, what happens to many people when they stop drinking the shakes is that they put any weight they have lost back on again.

Another problem with using diet shakes is that you still have to try to plan a healthy, balanced dinner each night. Many people wind up eating too much food for dinner or snacking in the evening because they are left feeling hungry. Often people wind up eating more calories at night when they only drink shakes during the day than they normally would have eaten and as a result don't see any weight loss.