I was a huge fan of Slim Fast shakes when I was younger. I didn’t drink them because they were good for me. I didn’t drink them because they were part of a diet plan. I drank them because I liked the way they tasted.
When I was older and decided that I needed to diet to trim the weight I’d put on after the baby, I remembered my great affection for Slim Fast and went gung ho for the diet plan. I drove to a Sam’s and picked up two cases of Slim Fast Shake Cans. Anything to make the diet plan easier.
The weight loss planned called for moderate exercise, lots of water and to drink two to three shake cans a day in place of meals. You were also required to eat one, low calorie, low fat and healthy meal a day.
For snacks, you could enjoy one of the puny, teeny, weeny, infitesimaly small snack bars that either tasted sickeningly sweet or like granola gone bad. Your choice.
The problem with this diet, from the get go, is that you are always hungry. The shake is a great pick me up, but an hour later you want food. If you follow the weight loss plan, you don’t get to eat anything. You can drink lots of water, but you don’t get to eat.
I lasted for about 18 days on this diet. But I was starving, all the time. My healthy meals got larger and larger. I was sneaking shakes in between drink times and I was positively floating on the amount of water I was drinking trying to fill up. My exercise plan fell by the wayside when the hunger pains far outweighed any desire to work out.
After 18 days, I’d dropped roughly 14 pounds, but the starvation and misery I felt were just not worth it. I dropped the plan like a rock and went back to eating regular meals. I gained back all the lost weight in relatively short time and I was miserable about that too.
The trick to the SlimFast diet plan is to put to work all the key components, three of which I didn’t. The first and most important component of any diet is to maintain your nutrition levels. When you’re exercising, you need to eat food to supply your body with fuel. You can moderate your one large meal a day into three smaller, but healthy choices that include lots of fruits and grains.
The protein shakes are great for replenishing protein loss so you can cut down on the fattier meat choices and stick to leaner meats like chicken and fish. With any good weight loss plan, you need moderate to good activity. You should ideally burn more than you intake in order to burn excess fat. My exercise vanished because I was hungry all the time.
Finally, you need support and a way to measure your progress. If you’re waiting for the scale to give you the measurements of your diet’s success or failure, you could be waiting too long for positive reinforcement. So it’s not that the SlimFast plan can’t work – it’s that you need to make it work for you.
Have you tried the Slim Fast Weight Loss Program? Did it work for you?