Product reviews: Meal substitutes, shakes

Slim Fast, EAS Myoplex, and Luna Bars-the list goes on. In today’s society, where most people are gaining weight instead of losing it, the diet and weight-loss industry has been booming. Every time a new McDonald’s opens on a busy intersection, a fitness guru sitting in a laboratory finds another way to dress up a milkshake and call it a diet. But do these meal replacement diets really work or is it all just a hoax?

The concept behind all of the different meal replacement shakes is the same: You replace two of your meals per day with the shakes and your third meal is something small and sensible (typically ranging from 400 to 600 calories). Each meal replacement has between 180 and 240 calories (depending on brand and flavor). Assuming that the two shakes and the one meal are your sole nutrition for the day, your total caloric consumption will weigh in around 1000 calories. So, a dieter following the meal replacement diet plan is essentially just restricting their caloric intake, which is one of the first steps to weight loss (besides working out). The average person needs to consume approximately 1200 calories per day in order to maintain their weight. If you take away 200 of those calories and you throw in a workout routine that takes away even more, of course you will lose weight! Not only will you lose weight, but your body will adapt to only eating 1000 calories per day and you will no longer feel as hungry as you did before the diet started.

Now the question is whether or not diets such as these are healthy.

As many know, a lot of diet supplements exist that may not necessarily be good for you since most of these supplements do not have to receive FDA approval. This means that if you are taking a diet supplement that you saw advertised on television, you can never be certain whether each supplement has the same proportion of ingredients within. But let us look at meal replacement shakes. They contain balanced portions of calories, fiber, protein, and carbohydrates. They do not restrict your body of anything to a point where you will overindulge later on and they contain the proper amounts of each type of nutrient.

Furthermore, most of them also contain traces of other natural vitamins and minerals that are good for everyday body function. In short, meal replacement shakes are good for the body and for weight loss.

Essentially, using meal replacement shakes in a diet is an easy way for people to receive the proper amount of calories, fiber, protein, carbohydrates, and fat without having to measure anything out on their own. If you are a nutrition guru, you would not need meal replacement shakes because you would know exactly how much of everything is in each food you consume.

Meal replacement shakes work (but only if you limit your caloric intake at other times in the day). From a scientific standpoint, the logic is staring you straight in the face; daily caloric reduction = weight loss. From a personal standpoint, I can say that this diet worked for me.

I am more aware of how I eat, I love how the shakes taste, and I managed to lose five inches off of my abdomen in nine days. Besides all of that, they make my life easier because I only have to cook once per dayyou can’t go wrong with that!