Focus on Fad Diets: Shakes

In the month of April I had five different people do my bootcamp and at the second class ask me to "join their team" to sell great weight loss products to all my clients. (I would make a LOT of money off your ignorance and they would make money off me: pyramid scheme style). When I tell them NO! I don't believe in supplements, I think real food is best. They pester me some more and when they realize that I am serious they ask for "permission" to start selling to people in their bootcamp class. I give them an even firmer NO!!!!! They don't come back to bootcamp. 

In fact, I read posts like this one and I even start to rethink if I should be taking  supplements. Girlfriend looks good!

But at the very end of her article she posts a picture of the check she received and then she says: "I ate a perfectly clean diet for 3 months, didn’t skip a workout (lots of HIIT and body weight exercises), and BUSTED my tail in the gym!!! "  Snap! Back to reality. I would look like that too if I did what she did. No shakes or pills, just food. 

So that brings me to why the average person who needs to lose about 20 pounds would drink any of these supplemental shakes aka "meal replacement shakes". They first surfaced in 1977 when Slim-Fast introduced a weight loss plan of a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch and a sensible dinner.

What do I really think?

Diet shakes and other meal replacements are OKAY when you lack the time or motivation to shop for and prepare balanced meals. They also help when you just don't want to think too hard about what to eat to lose weight. If you are consistently missing a certain meal, such as breakfast, then a meal replacement shake is better than nothing. That's because studies show eating breakfast fosters long-term weight control.

BUT!!!!! Dinner is where people who use meal replacement shakes get into trouble, You will simply be too hungry to control yourself at the evening meal. If two diet shakes, which can amount to 450 calories or even less, is all you've had by dinnertime, you've only used up about one-third of your daily calorie allotment, so it's little wonder you're ravenous. So instead of eating 3 oz of chicken, a green salad with fat free italian and a green vegetable with WATER, you eat lasagna, salad with ranch, garlic bread and two glasses of red wine because that's how many calories you have left to eat. Holla! Go to bed full, repeat tomorrow. (You're thinking, I can totally do this dieting thing!) 

Reality: you MIGHT lose a LITTLE weight because you are technically taking in less calories. The major criticism of these "shake diets" by health care professionals is they do not change poor eating habits and the lost weight is typically regained as soon as you quit drinking the shakes and start eating food. 

So you get to this point of the post, and you're discouraged again. Mostly because you've done what I described above and you still got 20lbs showing up on your scale that need to go away. You're also discouraged because you KNOW you need to change the way you are EATING (not drinking shakes, eating food). Come back tomorrow for a days example of eating. 

-marietta