I sometimes hear from people who want to know if the Medifast diet is effective if you’re only on it part time. As an example, I recently heard from someone who told me that she was willing to replace her breakfast and lunch with a diet meal, but she didn’t want to lose out on her family dinners and wanted to know if a “part time” meal replacement regimen might still be effective in helping her to lose weight. I’ll look more closely at this issue and tell you my opinion on this in the following article.
What To Consider When Thinking About Going On Medifast Part Time: I actually know quite a few people who have sort of a hybrid or part time Medifast regimen. While this diet does allow you a lot of flexibility with your daily “lean and green meal,” there are various reasons that people hesitate to go full time. You can eat a “lean and green” dinner that you prepare yourself with your family without much trouble, but if you didn’t want to do that, you could basically just replace the meals that you chose with diet meals and then resume regular eating when you chose that also.
But, how effective is this going to be? Would you still lose weight this way? Well, that depends upon what you are eating when you aren’t on the diet and how many meals you are replacing with the diet food and how many you aren’t.
If you’re overeating on your “off” meals, then you might cancel out what you gained at your diet meals. It’s important to keep in mind how Medifast works in order to try to come up with meals that help you to still accomplish this.
Is Taking In Less Calories And Ketosis Possible When You’re Only On Medifast For Part Of The Time?: This truly is the million dollar question. Because, theoretically, if you take in less calories than you’re burning, you should be losing weight. And, if you’re replacing some of your regular meals with Medifast meals, then you should be saving some calories for those meals. As long as you’re not overeating for your regular meals and canceling out what you’re saving, you should still be taking in considerably less calories than what is normal for you. This should result in some weight lost, especially if you are also moving more.
But another mechanism that makes this diet so effective so quickly is ketosis. This is the metabolic state that you get in when you’re taking in less carbs and more protein so that your body is encouraged to burn it’s own fat. This can make the pounds come off a little more quickly or dramatically. That’s not to say that you can’t lose weight without ketosis. I think that you can. But the results probably won’t come quite as quickly or be quite as dramatic. And, it’s likely possible to reach ketosis in your own if you’re quite careful.
Still, usually people in this situation are going to be accepting of any weight loss that comes their way. They realize that going part time may not yield the same amount of weight or pounds loss as going full time, but they’d welcome any weight loss, no matter how it comes. I personally think it’s better to go on Medifast part time than to not go on the diet at all. Some weight loss and success is certainly better than none and I’ve known people who’ve had a lot of success with this, even if they weren’t on the program full time.