When needing to loose weight, for example if people have been told they have a high BMI, people often turn to replacement meal diets. These help dieters to reduce your calorie intake by providing nutritious meal supplements such as shakes or meal bars, and support you with portion control.
When calorie intake is reduced, the body draws on fat stores in order to provide you with the energy required to function properly, meaning that fat is lost from the body. It is a simple way to lose weight without having to count the calories and plan and prepare meals from scratch.
Usually you replace two of your meals, breakfast and lunch with either a shake, soup, or a bar and your meal in the evening is 600 calories. Many plans recommend drinking 6 to 8 glasses of water a day, and allow 2 or 3 100 calorie snacks throughout the day.
Many plans also advise to take active exercise to promote healthy weight loss, along with changing your eating habits to make healthy choices.
By law, meal replacements must have nutritional value, and contain between 200 and 400 calories, along with at least 25 % protein and 23 minerals and vitamins. The fibre content is a round 5-6g in products, where the recommended daily allowance is 18g of fibre. Most diets however do recommend that you eat fruit and veg as healthy snacks to supplement you daily guideline amount.
Many meal replacements are very convenient, and take away the need to prepare and plan you food. Recent studies have also shown that meals replacements help people keep to their new lower weight.
However meal replacements do not educate people about their dietary requirements and if once you have lost weight and you go back to fatty foods, the weight will of course pile back on. Meal replacements can be expensive to follow, where as buying fresh fruit and veg is often cheaper. If you enjoy variety in your diet, and love to cook your meals, replacements might not be for you. Tastes tend to be limited to strawberry, vanilla and chocolate milkshakes and you may get bored quite quickly.
However you decide to diet ensure you chose the right one for your lifestyle.
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