Do it yourself Medifast

I write a lot about my experiences with Medifast. Someone came to my blog the other day and asked if it was possible to replicate Medifast yourself or find some sort of do-it-yourself alternative. I will answer this question in the next article.

What you would have to think about if you wanted a DIY Medifast plan: To replicate this diet, you would be eating six times a day. At five of those times, you would eat small, low-calorie, high-protein meals. Almost all of the “meals” on this plan are between 90 and 110 calories and packed with decent nutrition.

I’ll use the very popular shakes as an example. They contain 90 calories and 10 grams of fat. Plus, they have 11 grams of protein and 4 grams of fiber. They are very low in sugar with only 8 grams. And they are also quite full of vitamins and minerals. They contain 20% (or more) of your daily needs for vitamins A, C, D, B6, and B12, just to name a few. And they contain 30% of the iron you need each day, which is important for women.

Considering that you will be consuming 4 more similar meals per day, you will be providing your body with more of what it needs nutritionally, but you will also get a low amount of calories and a high amount of protein. This works to put your body into a state called ketosis where you’re not only not as hungry, but you’ll also start burning your own fat.

So obviously you’ll want to hit this goal with whatever alternative food you can think of. And you will need to find five of these alternatives per day.

Once a day on this diet, you will prepare a “lean and green meal” yourself. This meal should contain lean protein and up to three servings of vegetables. This isn’t too challenging and can be accomplished at the grocery store or even a restaurant, so replicating this isn’t a big deal.

Why a Medifast alternative would probably not be cost-effective: Many people who ask about a DIY alternative do so because they are trying to save money. But let’s think about this. To find foods that are so low in calories and sugar and so high in protein and nutrition, you may have to go to a health food store. And you’ll need to buy enough to be able to eat these small meals five times a day. You probably want a bit of variety, too.

A regular monthly package from the company costs $299, but there are always coupon codes and special offers that can make this even more reasonable. Unless you have a very good relationship with your local health food store and can get the foods at cost, it’s going to be very hard to beat that when you have to buy about 145 of these applicable meals.

In summary, I suppose with a lot of research and hard work, you could find some comparable foods in specialty stores, but they would probably be much more expensive than what you would pay to get the actual product.