Meal Replacement Diets - Personal Experiences
As a person who has been unhealthily obsessing about trying to be thinner and hating myself for failing, sorry, I meant dieting, for most of my life, I have tried various schemes, scams, pills, tricks, fads, and gimmicks. That includes a few varieties of meal-replacement plans. I am going to document my personal experience with three of them that I used for long enough to something substantial to say, and that I can remember the details of.
This is going to get long.
Herbalife
I'm not going to use this post to talk about the health issues that the company is accused of causing e.g. the reports of liver damage from users of the products or the unethical business model that meant they were forced to restructure to avoid being shut down as an illegal pyramid scheme (they were ordered to "start operating legitimately" and pay large fines which says a lot about how they had been operating up to that point). I didn't get involved in the exploitative business model or have noticeable liver damage from the products, so I'm just going to leave those subjects as additional warnings for why these are a product to avoid and move on to describing my own, personal experience.
I bought a bundle which included a few different flavours of shakes (definitely mint choc chip and vanilla, I think maybe strawberry), some fibre boost drink, and some low calorie snack packets.
The diet plan with Herbalife is that you swap out your breakfast and lunch for a portion of shake and then have a normal but low-calorie dinner in the evening. The flavour of the shakes was okay, but I really struggled with getting them to dissolve. I would end up with clumps of undissolved shake mix in the bottom of the cup. The mint choc chip one was particularly bad for this because the powder would clump around the little chocolate chips and form slimy lumps that were utterly gross. So from a taste perspective they were perfectly serviceable, but the actual experience of drinking them was still deeply unpleasant because of the texture.
I was also hungry constantly. The supposedly filling shakes were just... not. And because the only meal when following this plan was at the end of the day, that meant that I would spend the entire day feeling absolutely famished and thinking about that evening meal. I was miserable. I was distracted in work. I had no energy because I was starving. Literally.
Of the other products, the oak apple fibre boost drink thing was fine. That is my highest level of praise for anything to do with this company. It was drinkable. I would mix it up with boiling water and have a hot drink that gave me some extra fibre in my diet. I needed to stir it constantly and drink it fast because otherwise the mix would settle out and form a gravelly sludge at the bottom of the mug, but as long as I kept stirring, it was alright. I did drink the entire container of the drink mix and ordered a second one even after I'd given up on everything else.
Obviously, there are cheaper ways to get a fibre boost that don't involve supporting unethical business models, so I'm not saying I'd recommend it, but I'm giving my honest experience here and that drink was okay enough that I bought a second container of it.
The other thing I mentioned that I bought were these low-calorie snacks. They were some sort of dried pea or bean snack and I thought that they would be a healthy alternative to snacking nuts. They were rocks. Absolutely solid lumps that were so hard you could break a tooth trying to chew them and utterly devoid of flavour. Thoroughly inedible. I mean, the shakes weren't a pleasant experience, but at least I could physically drink them. These hard snack things were just impossible to eat unless I tried swallowing them whole like oversized pills.
I lasted at least a couple of weeks on the Herbalife programme, maybe a month maximum. I did lose weight. Of course I lost weight - I felt like I was starving constantly. I stopped because being on the programme was making me utterly miserable, not matter how many pounds I was shedding. Of course, the second I started eating real food again afterwards, I put about three of those pounds back on instantly because it wasn't real weight loss.
-3000/10 Would not recommend. Stay away. The only thing that was marginally tolerable was a drink mix that you could easily find a better, cheaper alternative for, and there are major health concerns that have been connected to the company's products. Plus they're an evil, exploitative company in ways beyond most diet culture exploiters.
Finally, this is a really minor thing but I might as well include it because it annoyed me, the "free gift" branded shaker bottle that came with my bundle was terrible quality. There was a flip cover over the drinking hole that didn't seal properly so the only way to use the shake bottle as a shaker was to clamp my hand over the flip cover and lid to make sure it didn't come loose and spray my kitchen with milkshake. This might have been part of why I had so much trouble getting the shakes to dissolve, but after I had to wipe milkshake off the kitchen walls and ceiling, it deserves getting called out in a personal experience post.
New You
The second personal experience I have with meal replacement diets is The New You Plan. This one was total meal replacement, so unlike the Herbalife plan, the idea was that you ate the plan's food and only the plan's food. Nothing else allowed. You could pick from a selection of dehydrated packets that you add water to and shake or microwave to make meals. There were a few options for bars or snack packets that were ready to eat as they were, but they were mostly dehydrated packets. You were allowed to eat four of these "meals" (and I use that term extremely loosely) a day as well as an optional snack from their range (but there were limits about how often you could have the various snacks).
They had a couple of drink mixes you could buy as well as optional extras. The only thing you were allowed to consume that wasn't on their plan was up to 250ml of skimmed milk per day in tea or coffee.
Most of their meals were between 150 and 200 calories, so even with the snack and the skimmed milk, you're going to be getting maybe 1000 calories per day, and that's if you go for the higher calorie end of the meal selection. I know that there are major problems with recommended calorie guidelines, but I think we can all agree that 1000 calories per day is not enough. Yet somehow their website includes the claim: "Our meal plan isn't about starvation." Really?
I will admit that I didn't follow the plan strictly. I had occasional days where real life activities were such that trying to eat rehydrated mush would have been awkward or inconvenient, like going to a catered training day with work, where I would allow myself to eat real food for a day. Or even on the days when I was following the plan, I might supplement my dried powder ration with a stalk of celery or a piece of fruit or even, *gasp* a piece of wholemeal toast on a couple of occasions.
I was aware that I wasn't fully following the rules of the diet, but I was still well under recommended calorie guidelines and losing weight, so I continued to allow myself these moments of real food, and I suspect that made a big difference in terms of my endurance of the programme.
The weird thing was that even though I was eating more real food on the Herbalife programme, I felt less hungry on New You. I don't know if this was because more of their meals were actual meal-like rather than purely shakes, or because of high protein levels, or because of my "cheating" and allowing myself to eat the occasional bit of fruit or veg in the middle of the day. All I know is that on days when I was following the plan, I didn't feel especially hungry.
On the other hand, my reaction to food on those in-between days when I didn't try to eat their packets was extreme. I remember the work training day in particular. They had a nice selection of breakfast wraps, fresh fruit, muffins cut into small segments and things along those lines. I got my plate and helped myself to three of the wraps, a pile of fruit pieces, and a small piece of muffin. It was a good portion of food - not excessively big but not stingy by any means. I took the first bite and just devoured the lot ravenously. If you had asked me before I started eating how hungry I was, I would have said I was fairly hungry, but not much more than I would normally have been right before eating a meal. But the second I started eating real food, I just needed more. I ate everything on my plate but wasn't satisfied and needed to go back for another wrap. At lunch, there was a good meal - something with fish and rice and a load of vegetables - that I would have considered a proper dinner, but after eating all of it, I wasn't satisfied. I still needed more food and went about found some of the leftover wraps from breakfast to have another of them.
I don't know whether it was a purely physiological response because my body was trying to replenish the calories it had been deprived, or a psychological response to eating something the tasted good. All I know is that in the gaps between diet days when I let myself eat real food, some part of me was desperate to compensate for what I had been putting myself through.
And what had I been putting myself through? Let's talk about the meal replacement options. I've alluded to this before, but they were mostly dehydrated powders that you mixed with water. Some were shakes and smoothie mixes. I tended to not go for those much because they didn't feel as much like a meal and were therefore less satisfying, although I will admit that the vanilla shake tasted nice. They definitely were easier to mix than the Herbalife ones. The microwave meals were things like vegetable chilli and rice, chicken noodle soup, or cottage pie mix, but they usually had some kind of boastful adjective in front of the same. So it wasn't just vegetable chili is was "Irresistible vegetable chili" or "super tasty sweet and sour". I'm pretty sure that I'm mixing up the meals and the adjectives, but you get the idea. Safe to say, the meals didn't live up to their labels. The portions were all tiny, so even the ones that tasted alright didn't really feel like a full meal.
I started with a trial pack that included a sample of all the meals and recorded my ratings of the meals as I tried them so I would know what to order or not the next time. I basically gave them a rating of 1 to 5 where 1 was uneatably awful and 5 was amazing. I didn't rank a single meal as amazing. There were maybe three or four I put in the level 4 good category. The vast majority were in the 2-3 star range.
I didn't stick to it religiously and I think that was a very good thing because I can't imagine the people who follow this diet for weeks or months having a good time on it. I didn't look forward to my "meals" or feel remotely satisfied by them. I can imagine this being soul-destroying to survive on long term. Yes, you will lose weight, but at a serious cost to your mental health, and I can't imagine this level of calorie deficit being anything but a disaster for your metabolism in the long-term.
I expect that's part of what the company wants. They want you to follow their diet plan and lose a bunch of weight super quickly through starvation. Then when you eat real food afterwards and inevitably put some weight back on, you're probably meant to be scared by that and go back and buy another bundle of powders and bars. It's not sustainable in the long term and will probably cause a lot of people to have a deeply unhealthy relationship with food (if they didn't already have that when they started).
0/10, wouldn't recommend, but not to the same degree that I would warn people away from Herbalife. "It's better than Herbalife" is not exactly a high bar to clear, but they cleared it. If you follow this diet plan, you will probably survive.
Diet Chef
The final company I want to talk about is Diet Chef, and I've saved the least objectionable for last. With Diet Chef, you sign up for a plan in multiples of 4 weeks (4, 8, 12, 16 or 24 weeks) and then every 4 weeks, they will ship you a big box full of your meals for that period. Notice that I didn't put quote marks around meals because these meals are actually recognisable as food.
They have quite a large selection to choose from. The food is grouped into categories of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, and for every day in your plan, you pick 1 of each of the three main meals and 2 snacks. There are shakes in the available options, but plenty of other things to choose from as well, e.g. just for breakfast you could go for granola or porridge, pancake mix or breakfast bars. For lunches, they had some pasta pots with dehydrated powder sauces you would add boiling water to, but also quite a wide selection of soups that came fully hydrated and with recognisable vegetables. If I ordered the vegetable soup for lunch, I would be able to identify chunks of carrot and potato and so on in that soup. I remember the pea and ham soup being good and I think there was a fish chowder one I really liked. The dinners were microwave warm-up meals but again, with quite a wide range and recognisable contents.
The meals were on a par quality wise with the sort of stuff you might pick up in a supermarket. I could go for a pot noodle type meal from a supermarket or one of the diet chef pots and they'd feel pretty similar. I could buy a pre-made soup or a ready-meal from the supermarket and stick it in the microwave, or I could get one of the Diet Chef meals and do the same, and I wouldn't feel that one was particularly higher quality than the other. The portion sizes might be a little smaller on the Diet Chef ones, but they'd still feel like you were getting a portion intended for a human adult to eat. Not all of them very particularly good. I remember the macaroni cheese being deeply disappointing. But on the whole, they were decent meals that were an acceptable representation of the microwavable dinner category.
The food was, without a doubt, much better on the Diet Chef plan than the New You plan. The total calories are still restrictive. The breakfast and lunch options were usually somewhere between 150 and 300 calories per portion. The dinners could be between 200 and 400 calories. The snacks were generally between 50 and 150 calories. So if you were going for the higher end of those, your three meals and 2 snacks could add up to around 1300 calories per day. Already that's more than the New You plan, but the other major difference between them is that the Diet Chef plan encourages the eating of additional food, especially fresh fruits and vegetables.
With New You, if I tried to make my pseudo-porridge mush more appetising by adding some blueberries, that would be cheating and breaking from the plan, but with Diet Chef, if I wanted to add some blueberries to my porridge mix (this one with what are identifiable as oats in there), this was treated as a perfectly reasonable and expected thing to do. They advise serving their meals with additional vegetables, and the warm-ups might come with suggestions for things to add. If you went for the curry warm-up, it might suggest pairing that with bread or rice.
They even acknowledge that you're not going to be able to stick to the plan every day in a way that's realistic and not at all guilt-inducing. With New You, taking a day off from the diet plan is a terrible failure that you should flagellate yourself for in punishment. With Diet Chef, taking a day off is normal and expected.
The overall attitude makes it much better from a mental health perspective. You can have extra fruit and veg and this is good. You can have a yoghurt without the sky falling in. If you want to have a bit of extra rice or pasta with this dish, go for it.
And it's convenient. If you're a busy person who struggles to find time to prepare real meals in between work and commuting and home commitments, then having a supply of quick and easy to prepare food on hand is helpful. If you tend to eat a lot of microwave warm-ups and packaged meals anyway, then swapping those for Diet Chef equivalents would probably be fine. The problem is that you can't just buy, say, half a dozen meals that you like the taste of so that you have a supply of easy dinners just in case, you have to sign up to, at minimum, a 4 week plan. Still, if you have a freezer, you could buy a 4 week plan, stash some of the meals away, and then have a store of easy food for when you want it over the next few months, in between eating without the restrictive diet plan.
Of all of these plans, Diet Chef was the one I stuck with longest. I can't remember exactly how long, but I started with 4 weeks as a trial and I definitely ordered again at least once and went for one of the multi-month packages that gave a discount. It was probably at least 4 months that I was on this diet plan, maybe as much as a year. The difference in quality of the meals and the attitude towards eating additional items was what made that big difference. Unlike the New You plan, I could actually enjoy my meals with this one and I didn't feel like I was being starved and deprived. I could have a plateful of real food, complete with fresh veg, and still feel good about sticking to the diet.
6/10 for this one. I don't recommend doing it as a restrictive diet, just because of the problems with restrictive diets in general. Calorie restriction isn't good long term, but Diet Chef is at least going to be on the same level as other calorie-counting diets that are out there, with the bonus that you save time on cooking. As someone who works full time, the convenience is a bonus.
As I said, of the three that I have enough experience with to talk about, this is the least objectionable. If you want to go on a calorie-restricted diet to lose weight, my first recommendation would be not to, but if you're determined to restrict and want the convenience of having a company provide pre-portioned meals, Diet Chef is not one of the worst ways to do it.
