Slim Fast Review

• Website: www.Slim-Fast.com
• Cost: For 2 meal replacements a day and the 3 snacks per day that is the maximum allowed then it comes to around $25 per week in products.
• Products: Free online membership site with meal replacement shakes and bars available as well as snacks.
• >> Click here to grab some

Overview

Slim Fast® is probably the best known meal replacement diet there is, they are famous for their shakes but they have a wide range of products now including meal bars, snack bars, bags of snacks like cheddar flavour bites, low carb and reduced sugar versions of the shakes and some bars in those fomats too.

In my opinion meal replacement diets are not the best solution to lose weight as often they don’t give you any idea how to keep the weight off and eat healthily after you reach your target. They may also miss nutrients that natural foods provide but are not on our current list of required nutrients.

The diet involves you replacing your breakfast and lunch with their meal replacement bars or shakes, then you can have a snack between breakfast and lunch, and lunch and dinner, you can have either fruit or their snack bars or other snacks. Then in the evening you have a 600 calorie meal and afterwards you can have another snack.

In all if you use their snacks it comes to around 1300 calories which is low enough that almost everyone should experience weight loss with it. The products don’t tell you what to have for the evening meal but you can join up to their online site for free and you’ll get some help there.

You just need to enter your address into the site to sign up, presumably so they can send you some offers by mail. Then once you are inside you get some message boards which are moderately active, there is also one where you are supposed to be able to ask their registered dietitian questions, but it looks like nobody has answered any of the questions for over 2 weeks now.

It is free though and if you fill in some questions on the site it will then put together a personalised meal plan for you and tell you what you should be eating for every meal of the day. It even gives you your evening meal and if you click it then you get the recipe and cooking instructions for that meal, along with a nutritional breakdown.

There have been some concerns about the amount of sugar in the products, I have the original shake mix and it tastes lovely, but it has sugar listed as the second highest ingredient. The newer Optima range was supposed to combat that and apparently has almost halved the sugar content, although I have seen complaints about the taste with that now, presumably due to whatever they added to take out the sugar.

Then I have the ‘fruits of the forest’ meal bars, and in them I was surprised to see not only glucose syrup, sugar, fructose, glucose, fructose syrup, rice syrup and modified potato starch in each bar but also… hydrogenated vegetable oil!

Now if you don’t know then hydrogenated vegetable oil is in the family of trans fats, the really bad fats that you want to avoid at all costs. I couldn’t find it in any of the snacks, but they all had sugar in and syrups etc.

This means they taste really sweet, not something you want when you are dieting as it makes you crave more sweet stuff, in fact as I write this I have already caved in today and had two of their snack bars after my shake at lunch (whoops!). Other meal replacement diets like the Cookie Diet® make their foods taste good but not really sweet and sugary so you are not tempted to pig out on them.

Slim Fast is the cheapest meal replacement diet I have seen so if you are really struggling to afford anything else and you really can’t stick to a normal diet like the South Beach Diet to lose weight, then maybe this is something you should try (read the South Beach Diet book if you reach your target weight so you know how to eat healthily and keep the weight off afterwards).

User Comments

Opinions online seem to differ. There is the obvious anatagonism towards it due to it being a meal replacement diet, that turns a lot of people who haven’t even tried the diet against it whenever they see people mention it.

There is also a lot of concerns about the taste, ‘chalky’ was mentioned a few times and ‘gritty’ for the bars. Some people struggle as they say they are too hungry or miss normal food too much.

Yet others seem to really like it and have lost weight with it, and some love the taste (like me). So I’ll give it just over half as there is a big mixture of opinions but I’d say more people liked it than disliked it.