Which Medifast Meals Fill You Up the Most?

I sometimes hear from people who are very concerned about hunger on Medifast, especially during certain times of the day. I had someone ask me: "what do you consider the most filling Medifast meal? Because I have such a long commute, I have to eat my breakfast very early in the morning. Once lunch time rolls around, I'm absolutely famished. So I need to either load up on breakfast or eat a very filling lunch. What are the most filling options?" I'll address these concerns below.

I definitely think that there are some decent options to work with this situation. And I wasn't sure if she was remembering her mid morning snack. That should help with the hunger. I too eat an early breakfast but I try to fit in a morning snack at about 10:00. Even if you are rushed, all you have to do is take the wrapper off of one of the bars to fulfill the snack requirement.

Filling Medifast Breakfasts: For breakfast, I feel that the most feeling item is a tie between the eggs and the oatmeal. The oatmeal is high in fiber and that helps you to feel full for longer. But the eggs contain a lot of protein and that helps with satiety as well.

Don't get me wrong, I love the latte and cappuccino as far as their taste go, but I just find them to be less filling. Now if she didn't have time for that mid morning snack, then she could also have that with her breakfast. So she might have oatmeal and a bar or eggs and one of the shakes. I know that the diet is designed to space out your meals, but in my own opinion (and that's all this is, an opinion,) combining two meals is better than skipping one of them.

Filling Medifast Lunches: As far as the lunches go, I find the chili to be the most filling for me, followed closely by the sloppy joe. I believe that the fiber in the beans make this a bit more filling than some of the other options. If I had to pick a third food, it would be the chicken noodle soup. Again, as with the breakfast, don't skip that afternoon snack if you are hungry. That's what it is there for. I find that somewhere between 2:30 and 3 is a good time for me, but choose whatever works well for you. And again, if for some reason fitting the snack in the afternoon isn't going to be possible, then consider eating it with your lunch. Possible combinations could be chili with the crackers. Or the sloppy joe with the brownie. Or the chicken noodle soup with one of the puddings.

Don't Forget About Additional Approved Snacks: Keep in mind that not only do you five prepackaged meals to play with, you can also have two approved snacks (with options like celery, pickles, jello, or nuts.) So if hunger is an issue, take advantage of the prepackaged snacks as well as the ones you can add yourself.

Other Options: I'll make one more point. You don't have to have your main, lean and green meal at dinner time. If she really wanted to fill up on breakfast or lunch, she could always make either of those foods her main meal and then have a prepackaged dinner.

If you want a little more information about making Medifast work for you as well as a peek at all of the food options, feel free to check out the free ebook "Getting The Most Out Of Medifast" at  http://easiest-diet.com/free-medifast-ebook/html

Paleo, Primal, SCD, GAPS: Which Diet Is Best for Autoimmune Illness?

Don't lie. When you first heard of the "caveman diet", you scoffed didn't you? Or perhaps you grunted a little. Sure sounded like another fad diet. I personally would've named it Encino Diet with Brendan Fraisier as posterboy to make it more competitive with Atkins, but hey caveman marketing is a bit primitive.

Fortunately for us, this doesn't appear to be a scam. Many patients with autoimmune or autoimmune-like conditions seem to benefit by changing to a diet based on evolutionary principles. No doubt you've heard of some of the most popular ones: Paleo, Primal, Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD), GAPS. There are a ton of resources out there on each diet, so I'll focus on the main differences between these 4 most popular diets & delve into success metrics, where available, rather than the details of each diet.

Hey McFly I'm borrowing the DeLorean to take a closer look at these dietary blasts from the past:

1. Paleo Diet

By far the most popular one, led by Loren Cordain & Robb Wolf. The focus is on all-natural (i.e. grass fed) animal fats and natural fats (ghee, avocado etc), and low carbs (starchy root vegetables, white rice, and other starches without antinutrients.) The basic tenet is that we're simply not evolved to optimize digestion and absorption of agricultural products.

Success: There are no controlled studies on this diet yet, but lots of >90% success rates reported by various doctors internationally. Dr. Jean Seignalet in France conducted a trial on autoimmune patients, with success being defined as 50% reduction in symptoms, and here are the results:

Rheumatoid arthritis: 200 (sample size), 80% (success rate)
Lupus: 13, 100%

Multiple Sclerosis: 33, 97%

Fibromyalgia: 41, 97%

IBS: 220, 98%

Crohns: 40, 100%

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: 11, 85%

2. Primal Diet

Mark Sisson is the main proponent. Basically the same as Paleo except it allows full-fat dairy. According to Mark's pictures, shirts should also be avoided. Wouldn't mind having that body though!

Chris Kresser is another big proponent of Paleo that has incorporated dairy such as grass-fed butter and kefir into his protocol with much success. He talks about not tolerating more than a teaspoon of kefir at first, but slowly building up to pints a day. I've heard similar stories from ME/CFS patients that benefit from fermented dairy. His theory is that taking probiotics via kefir actually changes your microbiota or gut flora to allow your gut to tolerate dairy.

Success: I couldn't track down any statistics specific to the Primal Diet, but due to its similarity to Paleo I would imagine if you could tolerate dairy, the statistics for Paleo might be a good reference. 

3. Specific Carbohydrate (SCD) Diet

This was developed by Sydney Valentine Haas, MD. At first glance it sounds like a low-carb diet, but the basic tenet is actually that carbs feed overgrowth of yeast & bacteria in the gut, so limit both the amount & types of carbs to well-absorbed. The major difference from Paleo: properly-prepared legumes such as beans are allowed, and like Primal, dairy is allowed.

Success:

Autism Research Institute's survey found that with 71% of parents noted improvement in their kids from SCD.

"Proponents of the diet claim there is an 80% recovery rate for Crohn's disease and a 95% recovery rate for diverticulitis." - http://altmedicine.about.com/od/popularhealthdiets/a/specific_carb.htm

And most impressive, results of a pilot study done on Irritable Bowel Syndrome:

"Notably, 9 out of 11 patients were able to be managed without anti-TNF therapy, and 100% of the patients had their symptoms reduced." - http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=cts_retreat

4. Gut And Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) Diet

Based on the SCD diet, and developed by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride. The main difference from the other diets is the focus on healing the gut, as opposed to just feeding it foods that are optimally digested & absorbed. Main difference from SCD: emphasis on bone broth and fermented foods, less beans, gradual implementation of dairy casein to tolerance starting from Ghee (which has virtually no lactose).

Success: Because this diet's the newest of the list, statistics are lacking so far. In my personal opinion, based on what we know about leaky gut though, the use of bone broths to provide easily-absorbed nutrition and seal the gut en route to building tolerance of fermented products makes this diet especially appealing for severe LGS.

Final Thoughts: There is far more similarity within these diets than there is different. GAPS was mostly developed as an improvement to SCD, and Primal was mostly developed as an improvement to Paleo. In the end, many practitioners agree that ultimately an elimination diet where you eliminate a food for 30 days and then add one thing in at a time (and monitor how you feel) is the way to figure out which foods and amounts of those food your body reacts to.

Which Diet Is Best For Me, And Why?

Most of us, including myself, have gone through this same scenario at least once in their lives: we want to lose fat, so we start reading about diets trying to find out which one is best. Yet we find so many conflicting opinions that we are utterly lost. This makes it very difficult to actually take action and start doing what needs to be done.

I will tell you exactly why all of these conflicting opinions exist.

It's because all diets work, as long as you follow one simple rule. I'll tell you what that rule is in a moment.

There are hundreds of diets currently available online, and the majority of them will try to force you to only eat certain products, while simultaneously telling you to avoid eating this or that. This is an entirely wrong approach, however people will still buy into it because it's very simple and takes all the work out of the process. If this is what you want, then sorry - you're not going to lose weight on a consistent basis. If you're willing to put in just a little bit of work though, then read on.

I said earlier that all diets work, as long as you follow a certain rule. The rule is that you must consume less calories than your body burns. Plain and simple. No way around it. There isn't a single diet on the planet that will make you lose fat if you don't follow this rule.

Let me give you an example of how this applies to every diet you may come across. Say there is a diet that says you should only consume 5 products (I'm making this up right now just for sake of the argument, but bare with me): chicken, cottage cheese, vegetables and eggs. The author of the diet promises that as long as you stick to these 5 products only, you are going to lose fat.

You start checking out testimonials about the diet, and you find a few people who actually managed to lose weight on it. Heck, you might even have a close friend who managed to accomplish just that with this particular diet. After a few extra minutes of research, however, it turns out that there are quite a few people who never managed to lose a single pound, and maybe even gained weight on that diet! How is that possible?

If you recall that one rule I mentioned above, you will immediately understand what's happening here. Simply put, some people were eating more calories than their body burns on that diet, while others were eating less than their body burns. The latter group is the one that loses weight. Unfortunately, because diet authors almost never go into detail about this critical point, it becomes a hit and miss for most people - they simply consume the 5 products in the list on a regular basis and hope that this will allow them to lose fat in and by itself. Some will get lucky and eat less calories than they burn and therefore shed some fat. Others won't be so lucky.

What I'm trying to get through to you here is that in order to make any diet out there work, you must know exactly how many calories you need to consume. The first step would be to find out exactly how many calories your body burns on a daily basis. Once you have that information, you must make sure that you consume less calories than that. So if you burn a total of 2,000 calories a day, the only way for you to lose fat is to eat less than 2,000 calories. Therefore if you were to consume 1500 calories, you are eating at a 500 calorie deficit (500 calories less than what your body burns). But your body needs those 500 extra calories, and it needs to get them from somewhere. And guess where it will get those missing calories from?

Your body fat.

About the author: Mark Nazzal specializes in 1 on 1 online weight loss and fitness coaching. You can contact him for help with your specific dieting or exercising issue through his website, where a large number of helpful articles are also available: Help Me Lose Weight