I recently received correspondence in which the writer asked if she could combine the Medifast and Weight Watchers diets. Specifically, she wanted to use the Medifast shakes, oatmeal, some of the soups, and pudding, while also using Weight Watcher’s smart ones line of frozen foods. I wanted to know if she would recommend this practice and if she thought it would work to help her lose some weight. I will tell you what I told him in the next article.
Combining Smart Ones foods from The Weight Watcher with food options from The Other Diet: I guess it wouldn’t be fair for me to tell the writer that she couldn’t try this practice. After all, it is physically possible to do so. But, my opinion is that she shouldn’t do this in the long run. Of course, I am certainly not a doctor or an expert and I would certainly like you to seek the opinion of one. But based on my research and my own experience, smart foods have too many calories, carbs, and sugars for you to successfully and quickly lose the weight you would have lost on the other diet. Please note that my experience has been with this particular diet, so my opinion might be biased based on my own positive results.
But I think Medifast works because it limits calories as well as sugars and carbohydrates. By doing this, you allow your body to go into ketosis where it can burn fat instead of carbohydrates. From my research and experience, I know that the average person consumes too much sugar and carbohydrates. And looking at the nutritional information for the smart, it seems that these foods do very little to address this problem. I’ll look at some specific foods in both diets to demonstrate this point below.
Comparison of nutrition, sugars and carbohydrates in Smart Ones with similar content in Medifast Foods: To examine the content of both foods, I’m going to look at specific examples of both diets. First, I’ll look at some breakfast foods. The Weight Watcher English Muffin Sandwich has 210 calories, 3 grams of sugars, and 27 grams of carbohydrates. Medifast Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal has 100 calories, 1 gram of sugar and 15 carbs. As you can see, one diet has about half as many bad things as the other.
Medifast asks you to eat a fresh, healthy meal that you prepare each day. This is known as the “lean green” meal and is eaten for dinner by most people. It is for this reason that I will now compare foods for lunch. From the smart line, I’ll look at the Santa Fe beans and rice. This one clocks in at 310 calories, 6 grams of sugars, and 51 carbs. Now, let’s take a look at the Medifast chili. You’re looking at less than half the calories (with only 110). You’re looking at a lot less sugar, with just one gram. And, the carbohydrate content is 15 grams.
The bottom line: Obviously, this article is partially based on my own experiences and biases. But I also think that comparing foods side by side makes a pretty persuasive argument that one of these diets gives you a better chance of success than the other. It has less than half the calories, carbohydrates and sugars of the other. In my experience, you need all of these numbers to be favorable in order to lose the most weight in the fastest way possible.
It doesn’t make sense to interrupt any success you may have by eating off-plan foods a couple of times a day. In this way you are potentially derailing your progress and undoing all the progress you have made that day. Medifast is designed to work as a system. There’s nothing to stop someone from taking parts of two different diets, but why would you? In my opinion, the reason people go on a diet is to lose weight as quickly as possible. And in my opinion, the combination of these two diets does not have the potential to accomplish this as well as following a diet as directed.