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Medifast Review: Online Diet Program |
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| Rigorous diet plan designed for rapid, dramatic weight loss; strong support program; adding your own fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy is recommended | |
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Medifast offers a meal delivery program that is considerably more rigorous than most of the other programs reviewed by NextAdvisor.com. Medifast is focused on helping those who are obese or seriously overweight improve their health.
Meals All Medifast meal packages are based on their 5 & 1 plan, which means that you eat five prepackaged Medifast meals and one 'lean and green meal,' which should consist of lean meat plus salad or vegetables. Your 'lean and green meal' adds some flexibility to this diet plan, since you can prepare it yourself or eat it at a restaurant. The five Medifast meals are not actually full meals comparable to those offered by other meal delivery services. Meal options include shakes and other beverages, soups, oatmeal, scrambled eggs, puddings and bars. Many of these items come in powder packets that you mix with water and microwave or refrigerate. Meals are formulated with low-fat protein and fiber and fortified with vitamins and nutrients. Dieters using the Medifast 5 & 1 plan eat once every two to three hours, for a total of six small meals each day. The Medifast 5 & 1 plan promotes rapid weight loss by restricting dieters' daily calorie intake to between 800 and 1000. For this reason, customers who already have an exercise program in place are advised to cut their routine in half for the first couple of weeks, and customers who do not already exercise should wait two to three weeks before beginning an exercise program. Once you have reached your weight loss goals with the 5 & 1 plan, the Medifast Transition, Maintenance and Exercise plans are designed to help you maintain your weight loss. These meal packages are not customizable, but individual meals and snacks are available for purchase from the Medifast website. Medifast also offers a meal package specifically designed for those with type 2 diabetes, which is available for the same prices. In addition to their standard packages, enhanced packages containing omega-3 pills are available. They also sell a variety of supplements intended for several different health concerns called Essential1. How Does It Taste? Just like the rest of you, we wondered how all these weight loss programs really taste. So we did something about it—we ordered the food and set up a taste test. Nine independent tasters of all ages and genders participated in our blind taste test. You can see the results at our meal delivery taste test. Medifast didn't fair as well as others, but still did respectably. Their performance makes sense, as Medifast is a different bird than the other programs we reviewed, and is intended for major weight loss. Because of this the meals weren't equivalent to the other full meals we tasted. Support Medifast provides a full range of support, from free nurses on call and an online community to more personalized Medifast Weight Control Centers (note: we don't address the Centers in this review). Free 24-hour online support is also available. myMedifast is their online community, and it is very full featured and fun to use. It's a great touchpoint for tracking your weight loss journey, blogging, and communicating with other members. You can also record your daily meals and exercise. If you are faithfully using this neat tool, you can even receive onscreen graphs of your weight loss, exercise, and a variety of other categories. Fitness myMedifast includes a section for chronicling your daily fitness activities. You enter what you did, and for how long, and the calorie burn is automatically calculated for you. The calorie burn is fairly accurate, as it's computed based on the last weight you entered for yourself. The calories burned are then displayed as subtracted from your daily calories intake, a very motivating touch. In another section of myMedifast, you can track your measurements over time. It's easy to do, just measure and input the data into the onscreen graphic of a person. The extra motivation of reducing both weight and measurements as part of your exercise and diet is a nice touch. Pricing A four-week supply of Medifast meals costs $299.50, plus shipping and handling, which varies depending on your location and the weight of the package. A two-week supply is $154.50. Customers ordering the four-week package receive 50% off the cost of shipping, plus three extra meals and a shaker jar, used for mixing powdered meals with water. If you'd like to order add-ons to the standard meals, the enhanced Super Omega-3 packages are priced at $28. The Essential1 packages range in price from $12 to $30 for a one month supply. In addition to the purchase of Medifast meals, you will need to add in your own fruit, vegetables, meat and daily. We estimated the weekly cost of this additional food to be about $75. However, as San Francisco food costs are more expensive than the rest of the nation, your supplemental food cost will probably be much less. Bottom Line Medifast is an intense diet plan designed to promote rapid, significant weight loss and improved health. Because this plan works, in part, by drastically reducing calorie intake, people with unique caloric requirements or health conditions should check with their doctors before beginning the Medifast 5 & 1 diet. |
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| Cost: | $9.98-$10.92 / day (excludes cost of added food) |
| Diet Types: | Low-carb-focused meal delivery diet |
| Support Types: | Online forums; tracking tools; access to nutrition and fitness experts |
| Fitness Tools: |  |
| Taste Test Rating: |  |
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