I recently received correspondence in which the writer asked me if she could combine the Medifast and Weight Watchers diets. Specifically, she wanted to use the Medifast shakes, the oatmeal, some of the soups, and the pudding, while also making use of Weight Watcher’s line of smart frozen foods. She wanted to know if you would recommend this practice to her and if you thought it would work to help her lose some weight. I will tell you what I told him in the next article.
Combining Weight Watcher’s Smart Ones Foods with Food Options from the Other Diet: I guess it wouldn’t be fair for me to tell the writer that she can’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 would certainly want her to seek one’s opinion. But based on my research and my own experience, smart foods have too many calories, carbohydrates, and sugars for you to successfully and quickly lose the weight that you would have lost on the other diet. Please note that my experience has been with this particular diet, so my opinion could 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 enter 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 nutrition facts for the smart, it appears that these foods do very little to address this problem. I will examine a few specific foods in both diets to prove this point below.
Comparison of nutrition, sugars, and carbohydrates in smart phones with similar content in Medifast foods: To examine the content of both foods, I am going to look at concrete examples from both diets. First, I will look at some foods for breakfast. The Weight Watcher’s English Muffin Sandwich has 210 calories, 3 grams of sugars, and 27 grams of carbohydrates. Medifast Cinnamon Apple Oatmeal has 100 calories, 1 gram of sugar, and 15 carbohydrates. As you can see, one diet has about half the bad stuff than the other.
Medifast asks you to eat a fresh, healthy meal that it prepares every day. This is known as “lean and green” food and most people eat it for dinner. It is for this reason that I will now compare foods for lunch. From the smart row, I’ll look at Santa Fe beans and rice. This one has 310 calories, 6 grams of sugars, and 51 carbohydrates. Now, let’s take a look at the Medifast chili pepper. You’re looking at less than half the calories (at just 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 is a pretty persuasive argument that one of these diets gives you a higher chance of success than the other. It has less than half the calories, carbohydrates, and sugars of the other. In my experience, it is necessary that all these numbers are favorable to lose the most amount of weight in the fastest way possible.
There is no point in interrupting the success you might have by eating off-plan foods a few 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 is nothing to stop someone from taking bites 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 achieve this, other than following a diet as directed.