Medifast.. Good or bad? Thoughts?
 

Hi guys, still new here and am loving the forum. I have gotten back into cycling, for enjoyment and to help me lose weight. I have heard some about the new Medifast diet. I am wondering if anyone has had any experience with it and if they got good results, or not.

You eat 5 small items every two hours then a " lean and green" meal at night or whenever. This seems like a good plan.

I am 6 foot and 280ish, I would really like to get down to at least 250 and I know I have to not only ride and be active, but also look at what I eat.

All comments welcome.

To get fit on the bike:
Ride lots of miles, mostly fast

To lose weight:
Eat often, mostly green

No need to buy anything special.

That makes sense, thanks bbeasley, I guess I'll just ride lots and eat celery haha. But really, thank you for the advice.

Fasting and exercise don't go well together.

Who said anything about fasting? I don't plan on not eating, just wondering about using the plan they have to help stay on track with small meals during the day.

Am I wrong to assume Medifast is a fasting diet?

you were not wrong to assume that, the title can be misleading. A fast for me usually is were I would not eat for 4 hours or more. This diet is structured so that you eat every two hours, like stated in my original post.

They are low calorie and high protein, mostly soy based.

I imagine the "fast" in the diet name refers to (the claimed) speed-of-results, but there's certainly an element of calorie restriction (aka "fasting") in there, as well. As Rosie O'Donnell said, "Eat less, move more". I don't know about riding "fast" -- at 280lbs (I was 300lbs), it's all "fast". But don't make "fast" weight loss a goal -- you didn't put it on "fast", and it won't come off "fast", either (at least, not in a healthy and/or sustainable manner). Just my 2-cents (and 75lbs lost, thus far).

It has some merit, does work for me a bit, but I'm not satisfied when I eat because I'm more restricted and I don't feel empty or full. I also don't like feeling that I always have something on my stomach and I also can't always get time to grab something. I have taken the principal though and use meal replacement shakes at work which works for me though they are not high protein or a piece of fruit, basically stuff that is easy. It isn't easy to grab something to eat at my job and I can go for 8 hours before I get my meal break.

The idea of the small meals through the day is to keep your metabolism up where if you only eat 3 regular meals you have time in between where your metabolism slows because the body goes into starvation mode.

The point I was trying to make is trying to do any significant amount of cardiovascular exercise while eating <1500 calories per day is not a good idea IMO. It's a recipe for fatigue and/or failure not to mention possibly messing up your metabolism. I would bump the calories up on exercise days by at least what you're burning during the exercise.

Alternate day fasting. I do it three days a week. Eat only 200 calories for the fasting period of 24 hours. Otherwise eat smart, careful not to overindulge. It starts to activate fat burning which otherwise is dormant.

alternate day fasting - Google Scholar

There is really nothing wrong with fasting and exercise, it takes a bit to get used to but certainly do able. I still ride about 30-40 km each day while doing it.

I would say fasting and very long extended bouts of exercise don't go well together. But it has worked well for me on rest days, and also combined with more moderate exercise days of < 1.5 hours.

30-40 km while eating a total of 200 calories that day? I suppose if you don't mind feeling hungry and fatigued all day long (+ on the bike) there's nothing wrong with it.

Yes, <90 minutes on the bike at low-to-moderate intensity I can see it being fine. My bike rides are a minimum of 2 hours long. And I don't see anything wrong with calorie restricting on days that you aren't exercising. Read the thread below for a good example of what happens when you mix too much exercise with a calorie restricted diet.

http://www.bikeforums.net/training-n...nce-focus.html

This "eat many times a day" stuff has been debunked. The seed of the idea was that there is some metabolic rise due to digestion, and the idea was by eating often one could raise metabolism. But it turns out that under study, the magnitude of this effect is proportional to the amount consumed. So if eating tiny amounts very often, the increase is small, if you just eat big less often, you get a bigger effect less often and it amounts to the same thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/he...anted=all&_r=0
Increased meal frequency does not promote greater ... [Br J Nutr. 2010] - PubMed - NCBI

I've lost 45 pounds perfectly fine, eating most days twice a day, and a couple days just once per day. Bottom line is it's the total amount of food per week that matters, not how often you eat or when you eat.

Starvation mode as is it is often described by people is also very much a myth, exaggerated/twisted way beyond what actually happens.

Honestly I rarely feel hungry, nor do I lose focus at work. I do feel a bit fatigued on my ride home some days, especially the last 5 km.

But I know dinner is there. On the way home my son is having his snack (dried fruit and seeds) and he shares (he is in a rear seat). He knows I love the dates and apricots which are a nice collection of sugars to get the last 5 km push home.

I am not say it is not tough, but the first week or two are the hardest, then it is just normal.

In 1990 when I returned to College as an old man of 35, I went on Jenny Craig. It worked really well. After I got out of college I hit 300 lbs.

I don't blame Jenny. It, like Weight watchers, is based on sound nutrition. Medifast, Optifast and others like that offer a similar product, but are often faster weight loss.

The danger of recidivism comes from the "on a diet" mentality. I used Jenny Craig to hit a goal weight of 175. Once I got there, I said "Great! I did it!" then went back to my old habits. A health crisis in '08 put me on a lifestyle change. I have lost nearly 90 lbs and am now down to 210 lbs. Rather than focusing on a goal weight, I focus on eating right. I have determined that I will maintain this for life. The weigh loss has been slow, but I have been loosing for over five years, and am mostly keeping it off. There have been some back slides, but the trend continues downward.

I will not dis Jenny, it was a good program, and I took away something very important from it-structure. A common misconception is that over weight people obsess about food. In my case it was the opposite. I didn't think about it, I just ate it. Driving home from work; hit the drive through. It was automatic. Now I obsess about what I eat. Time, amount, quality. I track every calorie I put into my body, and every mile I put on the bike. If I let up, I go back on autopilot and gain weight.

Now here is the deal. I will not discourage you from doing Optifast. I say go for it. Just remember that when you are done, you're not really done. You will never be done.

I can offer one bit of anecdotal evidence to debunk this statement. It works for me.

I think 40km is perfectly fine. The body has ~2000 calories in glycogen stored up to use, along with practically unlimited fat stores. He's not doing consecutive days without food. I agree that hard rides two days in a row combined with 2 consecutive days of fasting would become problematic, but that's not what he's doing. Fatigue shouldn't be an issue, and after awhile on the program, the hunger gets much more manageable. A lot of people have forgotten what real hunger feels like, a little bit peckish and reach for a snack, hence the obesity problem spreading worldwide. Force yourself on an intermittent fasting regime, try reaching for a glass of water instead, often you find the hunger diminishes or goes away for awhile, doesn't really get worse, and you make it to bed and eat normally the next day and feel perfectly fine.

I've been doing a more relaxed regime than he has, restricting only down to 600 calories twice a week.

I totally understand what you are saying, I lost a bunch of weight by just eating less. Then I hit where I wanted to be and over the next 2-3 years, it slowly came back on.

I know I will not lose he weight fast. I guess the best option for me her might just be to start a better eating regimen and then possibly use the "medifast" foods for small snacks, instead of going to the dollar menu or a soda.

Thank you all very much for the positive input, I will be starting a new lifestyle and its nice to have some people that back me up and share the same passion of bike riding.

Not sure what you mean by this. If you are saying that eating many times a day works for you, I never claimed that it can't work. I am disputing the idea that it works because it "raises metabolism", or that it necessarily works better than eating the same amounts divided among fewer meals. If one can better manage their total consumption & hunger eating much smaller amounts more frequently, great, do what works. But it's not necessary, and it doesn't raise metabolism. Some of us prefer more substantial meals, less often. So if you don't like eating six times per day, you don't have to in order to lose weight. You just have to find a way to eat less than you did before, that you can sustain long term.

Your glycogen stores won't be "topped off" if you haven't had anything to eat in the last 12-24 hours. Not that it matters since I don't believe the risk of bonking is what you need to worry about. I just know from personal experience that calorie restricting on days that I ride is a recipe for fatigue. Saying that you should just live with feeling hungry for large chunks of your waking hours strikes me as a tad bit radical. One of the benefits of doing enough exercise is that it's possible to eat more without gaining weight. So I just don't see the point of trying to mix a calorie restricted diet with moderate to higher levels of cardiovascular exercise. If you're going to fast though I would do it on days you don't exercise (assuming you have them.)

True, it is not necessary, but it really does make it easier for me.

This being said I have occasionally done two days in a row and it is a bit more rough. I have been doing this for almost two years so it is second nature. When I stop it is a matter of really watching what I eat or else I will over eat. Alternate day fasting is easier than calorie monitoring. Plus there are documented longevity studies, check the google scholar link I posted earlier.

I used to do 72 hours fasts in my undergrad days. Once or twice a year, not for weight loss but meditative almost. There were definite cycles of true hunger that would pass with time. I would still cook and shop during the 72 hours. I would drink water or tea but no food.

You seemed aghast at him doing 40k on a fasting day, like it's unbearable hunger. I'm saying that if you go on such a program for a few weeks, many really don't feel that hungry anymore, it's not unpleasant. And that it's possible that for some on the forum struggling to lose despite riding a lot, that forcing the feeling for awhile semi-regularly, can help better tune the hunger response. I didn't let myself get really hungry for years, and I got fat. After trying fasting, now I realize that hunger is often just thirst, or maybe boredom, and will often just go away even without eating anything. Now I feel a better distinction between this "I could eat" feeling and true hunger OMG got to eat something really soon "I need to eat"!

How are you defining calorie restricted? The thing with ADF and similar IF regimes is that the non-fasting days are not calorie reduced *at all* vs. maintenance level, some protocols are even "ad libitum", eat as much as you want. The calorie reduction is confined to the "fasting" super-low calorie days. So the net reduction over the entire week is usually very similar to a less calorie restricted every day diet. Some people are better able to adhere this pattern than trying to cut back every day.

Weight loss with exercise only, no calorie restriction at all, is fairly unlikely to succeed IMO, too easy to undo an hour of exercise in a few minutes of eating.

Before spending money on something like an organized program, figure out for yourself where your problems are by tracking what you eat for a period of time. I use the Myfitnesspal app and track my food and exercise that way. Once you track your food for a few days or a week of eating normally, it will become apparent to you where you are consuming extra calories. Then when you go to the grocery store, start looking for alternatives to what you are currently eating that are lower in calories. You can salvage alot of calories just by swapping out better choices. Things like bread can range from 50 to 120 calories per slice. Making the change from a 120 calorie per slice bread to a 55 calorie per slice bread is about 650 calories per week if you eat one sandwich per day. That is close to a pound fewer calories per month for something as simple as changing what kind of bread you buy. You can do the same thing with a whole variety of foods and end up cutting way back on your calories without fundamentally changing how much or how often you eat. Then if you start substituting veggies for part of the meat content in other things you eat, and cut down slightly on portion sizes for what you eat, you gain even more. But it all starts with tracking what you are eating. That is free, and it will open your eyes to where the savings can happen.

In my case, I have found that trying to front load calories with a high protein breakfast, and then spreading the rest out over the day in small meals and snacks is a very easy way to avoid that gnawing hunger feeling. I probably eat more often now at work than I did before, and I am currently eating less than half the calories I used to. I have been eating with a goal of 1500 calories net per day (net meaning I subtract the amount burned in exercise) since late February, and I am down 48 pounds in a little over 3 months. I try to eat about a 300-350 calorie breakfast high in protein, a 300-350 calorie lunch, and 2-3x100-150 calorie snacks during the day, then another ~350 calories for dinner. If I am going to work out or ride, I may add an extra snack either late afternoon an hour or so beforehand, or as a recovery snack right after the workout to replenish glycogen if I am doing high intensity intervals.

One thing I found that has really helped me is to cook foods over the weekend and separate them out into individual meal sized portions. It is amazing what kind of food you can eat if you select ingredients carefully and parcel it out into proper sized portions. Doing it over the weekend allows me to just grab a tub of food from the fridge on my way out the door and not have to stop and prepare a proper lunch to eat at work, or worse head to a deli or fast food restaurant for lunch. We have been eating things like chicken enchiladas, black bean chili, avocado chicken wraps, etc. and they taste great and are less than 350 calories per serving, because we select good ingredients and avoid adding lots of junk to them. I was the type that thought I could never do it without an organized program, but I gave it an honest try, and have been absolutely amazed at how easy it has been to get where I am so far.

The morning leg probably of the commute probably isn't bad but the ride home you have had essentially zero calories in the last 18 hours? That sounds at the very least quite unpleasant. I will concede that perhaps we have different ideas of what constitutes unpleasant...I know what I would feel like just sitting on the couch if I hadn't had anything to eat in 18 hours. These fasting diets strike me as being designed for fairly sedentary folks. Not people burning thousands of calories per week riding their bicycles.


In the case of the OP, he was asking about your typical <1500 calorie per day diet. If you are fasting for 24H at a time I would say you are calorie restricting during that period of time. IME mixing moderate-to-higher levels of exercise on days that you calorie restrict is just a bad idea IMO. If you're going do it try coordinate to fall on days that you aren't exercising.

True, but there's a big difference between dialing back your calories by 300-400 per day below your RMR and some of the (frankly) radical diet plans being advocated for in this thread. Since this is a cycling forum I would say some mix of a moderate amount riding + reasonable diet are the best approach maintaining weight loss. If your idea of "exercise" is doing 30-40 minutes on the treadmill 3X per week diet becomes a lot more important. I burn 5-7k calories per week on the bike which means I don't have to watch what I eat all that closely.

I am tired on the way home, but who is not a bit tired in the last 5 km of a 40 km round trip commute? My first and last 8 km of the commute is with my son in his seat, so that is far more fatiguing than fasting to me. This being said, I usually feel the same on fasting days and non-fasting days.

I find sitting on the couch stagnant to be far worse when hungry than working or cycling. I will give in to temptation to snack on the couch, but I can not, nor do I want to when working or cycling.

Honestly I stumbled across this thread on accident. I am not clyde, I have maxed out at 195, but moderate my weight at 180-185. I would love to get to 170-175 but those were university competitive swimming weights. I have always lead an active life, punctuated with injuries and weight gain.

Try for two weeks. Fast from dinner to dinner. Resist the urge to snack, or if you must make it good, cheese, nuts, seeds. It is hard at first, but it gets easy after two weeks. Eat regular on non fasting days. I have also cut back drinking to maybe two beer a week. That is the biggest difference.


Otherwise great advice on myfitnesspal, great for keeping track. It is surprising how much you actually eat if you get a scale and measure it.

My suggestion would be to try it and see if it works for you Farhat. I've seen testimonials for every diet & life style change that I'm not sure what to believe anymore. And I've seen someone refuting those testimonials based opinion, personal experience, common sense, or a scientific study.

So don't worry because whatever happens you'll either lose weight, gain weight, or stay the same.

Maybe it sounds unpleasant to you, but you haven't tried it. Joeyduck and I have. It's really not bad at all IMO. We have plenty of energy stored in our bodies to last a couple hours. I definitely wouldn't try 50 mile ride on a fasting day without taking in some additional food. But 40 km, half that, that sounds perfectly fine, if it's not like being ridden at a time trial pace. That should take maybe 850 calories. Between glycogen stores refilled from eating the day before, and fat burning, one has plenty of energy to not hit any wall. Moderate amounts of exercise actually suppress hunger, for me.

The body just doesn't need that many calories, even with a moderate amount of exercise. That's why some people get into trouble, they overcompensate how much additional they need because they rode. Ride 20 miles, eat two Clif bars, really didn't need to eat any.

It's not fasting every day. Plenty of calories available for riding. Hasn't stopped me from riding ~3100 miles in the 9 months I've been doing it. Save the epic rides for the eating days, and eat during those rides, but shorter & less intense rides are perfectly pleasant on the fasting days with just water.

Moderate exercise is fine. 3+ hour rides, or high intensity > 2 hrs, I would schedule different days. I just don't see why you think 40km is a bad idea if he has been doing it and doesn't have any problems with fatigue/recovery.

It's really not that radical if you look at it on a weekly basis rather than daily. It's just a different calorie distribution from day to day. Say rider does 6000 calories per week of exercise, including RMR needs 3000 calories per day to maintain weight. Conventional diet, target 1 pound per week loss, you eat 2500 calories x 7 on average (adjust for extra hard rides, less on other days to keep total same). My diet, it would look like 800, 3200, 3200, 800, 3200, 3200, 3200, to target approx same rate of loss (also with adjustment for hard rides, not falling on the 800 days). ADF tends to be more aggressive looking for faster rate of loss, might be more like 3500/600 pattern for 2 pound per week target, but one can always adjust upwards to lose slower.

It's just something that works for some people better, feeling some deprivation only part time rather than every day. Plus it does things with various hormone levels and there is some preliminary research indicating possible health benefits. It's not for everyone, for sure, but you can exercise fine on it, just more moderately on the fasting days. Obviously it's not compatible for a huge volume race training schedule requiring fewer rest/moderate days, but there's still plenty of room for a good deal of exercise even on the ADF plan.

I personally hate the feeling of being hungry while riding at even a moderate pace. I rarely eat breakfast so I'm familiar with what it feels like to go 12-18 hours without taking in any significant amount of calories. If I ride in that condition I feel lethargic, struggle to make power and look forward to getting home so I can eat something. The concept of intermittent fasting can make sense for the average American leading a fairly sedentary lifestyle. It makes very little sense to me to fast on a day that you're doing 2+ hours of endurance exercise. If something doesn't cause you physical harm that doesn't make it a good idea.

I started at the same weight - 195lbs; 28-29 BMI - and I'm down to around 160-165lbs. I don't own a scale and am only mildly curious about how much I weigh. I would still ride just as much as I do now (190-200 miles per week) even if I didn't lose a pound. In fact, my first year back to cycling in 2012 I rode ~3500 miles and didn't lose a single pound of weight.

You haven't shown that it's a bad idea either. All you've basically said is it sounds like a bad idea to you, you haven't really explained why it's a bad idea generally. Just because you feel lethargic & hungry in certain conditions exercising not having eaten for 18 hours doesn't mean everyone will. Two of us on this thread already said we generally don't, you get used to training fasted. I wouldn't fast for "2+" hours of endurance exercise either. But we were talking 40km originally. That's well less than 2 hours at a sedate pace.

For people who still have weight to lose, I'm just throwing it out as a workable option, and asserting that fasting and *moderate* amounts of exercise mix just fine for a lot of people after you get acclimated to it, not "don't work together" as you originally asserted. Maybe it doesn't work for you personally, but don't pooh-pooh it totally for everyone.