They Don't Make Them That Big

Ran into a lawyer friend the other day. Hadn't seen Jill for months. She had been packing on the pounds the last time I saw her. Crazy schedule. Client lunches. Client dinners. Late nights at the office. "Who has time to even think about planning a meal."

When you get a little older priorities and schedules change. You don't find the time for the gym on Saturday morning. Friends move. Tennis a few times a week gets replaced with something less physical. You're busier than ever, and before you know it a little bigger around the middle than ever too.

Jill was looking good when I saw her. I asked her about it. She said her moment came last Winter when she was looking through catalogues for outdoorsy outfits she was going to need for a Spring vacation trip. "They didn't list the size I needed in the catalogue, so I called them." The salesperson sounded young. Probably skinny with a bad complexion too. The answer: "Hey, they don't make them that big" was Jill's wake-up call.

"I couldn't get my arm through the phone line, so I knew I had to change something." There are personal trainers. Books. Diets. The information is out there but "I just didn't have the time for a lifestyle changing course."

Jill said she went with a meal replacement program. "I don't count calories. I don't shop the outer aisles, and I don't cook." "Everything is delivered and it's right there when I need it."

Jill's logic is inescapable. Practical too. A ten year study by George Blackburn, M.D., an expert in nutrition and metabolism at Harvard medical school compared two groups of people in the aptly named town of Pound, Wisconsin. The Harvard team gave one group meal replacements that they stayed on until they reached their desired weight level, and then went back to from time to time to maintain. The comparison group simply "followed the eating habits of their community," says Dr. Blackburn--which, in Wisconsin, was likely to include lots of cheese and bratwurst.

A decade later, the people using meal replacements for weight control had maintained a 7-pound weight loss, on average. Big deal, right? Well, yes, when you consider that their home town counterparts gained 25 pounds, on average, during that same 10-year stretch.

Depending on your needs and your budget there are a couple different ways to go with a meal replacement program. You can pick-up meal replacement drinks and shakes at your local grocery store. You buy these liquid meal replacements in six or ten packs and use them to replace one or two regular meals per day. Assuming a normal three meal day, that still leaves at least one regular meal to plan and prepare.

The next level, and the one that seems to work the best for most people because it is the easiest, is to go with a professionally prepared replacement meal program. The best part of these programs, Medifast being the most prominent, is that you don't have to do anything other than take delivery. Their prepared meals include shakes, but you get some solid food too like bars, soups, oatmeal, chili, and puddings.

You are not guessing about your nutritional intake either. The pros serve up low-calorie, nutrient-balanced, vitamin fortified meals that are medically supervised and are being used by millions of other people.

Professional meal replacement is the way to go if you want to lose weight now without the hassle of calorie counting and aisle shopping. Like Jill, you can worry about the "big" lifestyle changing stuff later.