Atkins Diet, Slim Fast, South Beach Diet

In Part 2 of Diets Demystified, I’ll look at 3 plans that include meal or snack replacements. These plans all include supplements easily found in your grocery store aisle.

Disclaimer 1: I have some friends on the South Beach Diet who have achieved good results so far. I’m not aware of anyone on the Atkins Diet or using Slim Fast.

Atkins Diet: The supplements you can buy at the store, ranging from snacks to full meal replacements, run from roughly 130 calories each to over 200.

They tend to be low in sugar, using sugar alcohols for sweetness, but one item, the Advantage Marshmallow Mudslide Bar contains 4.5 grams of saturated fat. Read the labels to avoid the fattier products when on this diet. Their online advertising appeals to your desire to be sexy, which seems to show they are targeting women more than men.

To find out if it’s right for you, you answer a short survey on their website. It’s very general, so it’s easy to say yes, it is right. As with the others, they stress putting you into a fat-burning mode, called ketosis. (Though I did not find that word on their website.)

The diet takes you through 4 phases, a jump start phase for quick loss, a steady phase for ongoing loss, a pre-maintenance phase followed by a lifetime phase.

Reminder: Weight loss is achieved through using more energy than you take in.

Most plans these days avoid having you count calories because it’s considered too cumbersome for most people. In phase 1 of Atkins, you could lose up to 15 pounds in 2 weeks. This is due to a severe carbohydrate restriction. Or what appears to be. I’m not sold on this idea that you can subtract fiber and sugar alcohol from total carbs to yield net, but the purpose is to show what carbs impact your blood sugar. These are the ones that would put you on craving swings.

One meal plan, where you would prepare 3 meals and include 2 supplemental snacks, came in at about 1300-1400 calories.

Atkins meets 4 of my 5 criteria, having balanced nutrition, easy to follow, not too expensive and a maintenance plan. With 3 meals to prepare, it doesn’t meet my minimal preparation time.

Slim Fast: I’ve drank Slim Fast shakes (they are very good) and snack bars in the past.

This is another plan that requires 6 meals/snacks per day (similar to Take Shape for Life). They recommend a 500 calorie meal for your main meal, and their supplements typically run around 200 calories each. One advertisement mentions being able to go 4 hours without feeling hungry.

The website has a community forum where you can stay in touch on line and also consult with health advisors.

When I looked at the Slim Fast labels, they appeared to be high in sugar; shakes having 17-18 grams, meal bars running 15 grams with an additional 10 or more grams of sugar alcohols, snack bars running 7-9 grams for 120 to 140 calories.

Slim Fast appears to run about 1200 calories, roughly, per day, depending on the meals you cook.

It meets 4 of my 5 criteria: balanced nutrition,  easy to follow, not too expensive and a maintenance plan. It falls short on the minimal preparation time. For those of you who like to cook, any of today’s reviewed diets would work.

South Beach Diet: Another plan espousing eating more frequently. This one touts a dessert in addition to 3 meals and 2 snacks. When I look at a sample day I come up with 1100-1200 calories.

It includes pre-packaged snacks and desserts and even meals you can heat up, in addition to recipes you can follow if you like to cook and prepare your own meals. On this plan you could follow it without buying any of their products. It also has a shopping list planner which I know one person following the diet found very helpful.

It again meets 4 of my 5 criteria, the minimal prep being the one that it doesn’t.

Today’s diets run in the 1100-1400 calorie range, so you should be able to find some success with them. The key, once again, is finding one that you can follow.

I’ll wrap up next time with 2 more diets and an overall comparison.

Until then, to your good health and you can follow my progress on my blog: Fit Past 50.