Packaged diets can be useful, just don’t try to live on them forever

We love packaged food diets. When you are beginning your weight loss journey they are an invaluable asset to helping you restructure how you think about food and are a sure way to see large amounts of pounds come off quickly which will help keep you on the journey in those tough initial weeks. However there is a danger to your waistline if you stay on them to long, and that danger comes when you eventually get off them.
First the good things about prepackaged diet plans. They are successful at removing your need to think about what you are going to eat. Let’s face it our thoughts about food are what got us overweight in the first place, so we need to relearn what to eat, how much to eat and when to eat. These meal plans do that very well. They will have the right portion sizes so we will relearn how much food we should eat at any given time, they will instruct us of often to eat so we learn to keep our metabolism running, and they will be comprised of the right food choices so we can learn what we should have been eating all along. If you stay on one of these programs religiously for three months your ideas about food will dramatically shift and you will know have the knowledge you need. Another benefit is they are easy to follow. Heat up one of these every couple hours; does it get any easier than that? Those first few weeks on any restrictive diet will be hard enough on someone who loves food so you need something that is easy.
Now for the not so good things about these prepackaged meal plan. They aren’t what those of us who love food would consider “real food”. They are prepackaged processed food, and that isn’t exactly words one would use to describe real food. They don’t offer an unlimited variety and we all crave variety in our lives. They don’t allow for eating out, which we will all find ourselves needing to do at some point. Even those that taste great can’t replace the joy brought on by selecting a meal’s contents. Remember they are prepackaged so you aren’t getting all the nutritional value you would get from real food simply because of the process required to make food capable of surviving the packaging process.
So how do you successfully use these prepackaged meal plans? We highly recommend using them when you’re starting a diet to get that first large chunk of weight off and to allow your brain to be reprogrammed when it comes to food. This time period will vary based on the individual but typically we are talking three to six months. Once your weekly weight loss has declined to under two pounds a week and you feel comfortable that your ideas of food are different get yourself back to regular foods. From the prepackaged meal plans take with you the lessons on portion control, eating every two to three hours and combine them with selecting fresh ingredients and avoiding processed foods, refined sugars and caloric high options. Typically we see people’s weight loss slow down a bit as they transition back to real food, but that’s ok. At this point you have less weight to lose and are building a diet plan that you can live on for the rest of your life. If you begin to struggle with your food selections or start to see the scale moving in the wrong direction for more than a couple weeks you can always get right back on the prepackaged food plan for another month or two, a cycle you can repeat until you are ready to eat in the real world.

Share on Facebook