I have to admit that I’ve been receiving questions about this diet plan for a while and waited until now to write an article about it. The reason for this is partially because I don’t have any personal experience with the New Lifestyle diet. My experience lies with Medifast. However, after doing some research on the newer diet for a while, I’m going to offer some basic comparisons between the two diets in the following article.

The Basic Outline Of Both Diets And The Foods Offered Are Somewhat Similar: Actually when I first looked at the foods for New Lifestyle, I was wondering if I was on the wrong website. The foods are very similar to those offered on Medifast. What I mean by this is that the shakes, protein bars, soups, stews, cereals, chips, and hot chocolates are all there. The two overlap very much in this regard.

Also, the idea of both diets is meal replacement. You’re basically asked to eat the food that the diet company provides rather than your regular meals. Both of these plans have you eating 5 (Medifast) to 7 (New Lifestyle) meals per day and then one healthy meal that you make yourself which is mostly based on lean protein and low glycemic vegetables.

So your experience on both of these diets might be similar in terms of eating small meals often (most of which you don’t make yourself) and then eating a main meal once per day. In general, the foods should be high in proteins and low in sugars and carbs so that your body can get into ketosis where it’s not burning carbs but is burning your own body fat. This is what supposedly makes both of these diets work.

Costs Comparison: Both of these diet plans offer packages as well as individual items for sale. In my experience, most dieters will opt for the package as this makes the cost per unit quite a bit cheaper. I’ve been noticing this perception that New Lifestyle is cheaper, but I don’t find that to be the case in real life. Yes, if you compare both basic women’s programs, New Lifestyle runs $273.00 and Medifast runs $299. But, this does not tell the whole story. Because, at least from my own experience, Medifast almost always offers very generous coupons which take your price on a package down by at least $50 in many cases. This alone makes a huge difference and they will often offer free food.

The Questionable Ingredients In The New Lifestyle Diet Foods: You may have already gathered that my experience lies with only one of these diets, which I’m pretty happy with. This fact alone might make me biased. I have had people ask me if I would consider switching based on costs. But, as I’ve said, I actually don’t believe that Medifast is more expensive when you use coupons.

However, the real kicker for me is some of the ingredients in the other diet (which include corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils, and aspartame.) Now, by no means am I an expert, but even I know that these are foods that are considered unhealthy and not diet friendly. Not only that, but the corn syrup especially is not conducive to getting into ketosis.

In my opinion, it just doesn’t make sense to change over to a diet that includes these questionable ingredients. I have read on some of the forums that the taste of the New Lifestyle foods is not as good as Medifast, but I don’t have personal experience with that. I can say that I’m happy with what I’m doing and with my results. Since it’s not broken, I just can’t see fixing it with a plan that includes ingredients that I don’t endorse in their foods. I would never consume these things in my “lean and green meal.” so why would I eat them in my diet foods?

I often get questions about the cost of Medifast. I get questions about the cost per day, the price per week, the cost per month, and the price per pound. Of all of these, the cost per month is probably what I am asked about the most. This makes sense because the most economical way to buy food in this plan is as part of a monthly package. This brings your cost per meal down by a good deal. I’ll discuss the monthly price of the Medifast packages below.

The Cost Of The Medifast Women’s Diet Program: When most people ask about the price of this plan, they are mostly asking about the 5 plus 1. This is the plan that Genie Francis and Kristie Swanson are on and promote. This is the basic women’s plan where you eat five of the diet’s provided meals and make one “lean and green meal” on your own. Now, when I say the provided meals, I don’t just mean shakes, although shakes are a popular choice. There are over 70 foods to chose from which becomes a good thing after a while.

Anyway, the starting price for this one is $299 for 143 meals (about $2.00 a meal.) But that is before taking any discounts, specials, or coupons which are almost always running. At the very least, you can often get 2-3 weeks of free food, but sometimes there is a $55 off special running. Of these, the free food is actually the better deal because it is worth more monetarily. However, whichever discount you chose, you should never pay full price.

The men’s and diabetics packages are the same cost ($299 before any deductions) and have the same amount of meals (143). There are some specialty packages that cost a bit more, which I’ll go over now.

Specialty Or Enhanced Medifast Packages: For each of the basic packages (men’s, women’s diabetic), there is an enhanced version which basically adds in omega 3s for heart, nails, hair, and skin health. This doesn’t add a lot onto the cost (it comes out to be around $327 before coupons), so if you have cholesterol or heart issues, this might be worth your while, but many just stick with the 5 plus 1.

The Price Of The Medifast Momentum Line: This is the most expensive monthly package that they sell, but the reason for this is that it adds the “momentum” products which are the flavor infusers, cappuccinos, and shakes that have ingredients meant to boost your metabolism. These meals contain a bit of caffeine and the active ingredient in green tea to rev your metabolism. There is some literature which suggests that adding in the momentum line can burn as many more calories as a brisk walk, but they only wanted you consuming three of the momentum products per day.

One trick to know is that they don’t consider the flavor infusers (powder you add to water like crystal light) to be a meal. This counts toward the water requirement instead. But the cappuccinos and shakes do count toward your meals and they only want you having three per day. So, if I do use these, I go heavy on the flavor infusers. This package is the most expensive option at about $350. However, again, this is before you consider any of the specials or promotions running. And, the momentum products do sell individually if you’d like to go that route.

The other day, I received an email from someone who wanted to know if it was really necessary to order the medifast shakes online. She had made the decision to diet, wanted to get started right away, and asked me, in part: “what’s to stop me from just buying one of the protein shakes at the grocery store and then getting the same results Let’s just use the new special K protein shakes as an example. What makes the one of the shakes different (or better) than the other ” I’ll answer these questions in the following article.

A Quick Review Of Ketosis: Before I actually take a look at both of the products, I want to quickly explain ketosis, which I’m going to be talking about a lot. This is a place that you want your metabolism to go because if you can get there, your body will begin rapidly and efficiently burning fat. This happens because you aren’t giving your body as many carbohydrates while giving it more protein. The higher protein helps it complete this mission by giving it enough fuel to do it’s job. The lack of carbs ensures that your body burns fat since it can’t burn sugar. In my comparisons below, keep in mind that you need both a high amount of protein and a low amount of carbs and sugars to be able to accomplish this.

A Quick Comparison Of Medifast Shakes And Special K Protein Shakes: I’m going to specifically address the example that she gave me, but there are tons of shakes available in the grocery store. I would argue that very few of these would favorably stack up to the nutrition and protein to carb ratio of the Medifast shakes, but I can show you that better than I can tell you. For this example, I’ll be using the 55 shakes because they are the most popular.

In terms of calories, Medifast is much lower with only 100 as compared to 180. 80 additional calories is almost twice as much and can really make a difference. Now, the K version does have a respectable 10 grams of protein while Medifast barely edges it out with 11. But, to me, the true difference lies in the amount of carbohydrates, which is 29 (for the K) as opposed to 13. This is over double the amount which in my mind is very significant and enough to keep you from being able to get into ketosis. Likewise, the special K shake contains much more sugar, a whopping 18 grams as opposed to 8 grams. Again, this is more than double and can be a big deal in terms of ketosis.

I hope this article has shown you that while it may be nice to impulsively pick up your shakes at the grocery store, in terms of nutrition and effectiveness, you may well be better off waiting the few days that it would take for the company to ship your order. And, they do sell all of the products individually as well, so you don’t need to place a huge order just to buy any of the products.

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Okay….but how difficult is it to lose weight on Medifast How does it compare to other diets on the market

Honestly Any GOOD diet is pretty much only as good as the discipline and drive of the people who are on it! You can get the very best blueprint to a beautiful body and do nothing with it, and unfortunately, this if far more common than most of us would like to believe. The good news Medifast is a super easy program to follow, and in our view, if you stick with it, you WILL lose weight really quickly for certain.

How does Medifast “guarantee” that it’s clients and customers lose weight And how can you be that certain

The truth Medifast is a low calorie, low carbohydrate and high protein diet. If you stick with it as designed, you will have 1000 calories per day, or less. The way our bodies and metabolisms are constituted, it would be almost impossible NOT to lose weight following this sort of calorie restriction on a daily basis, and this is why Medifast has such a unusually high success rate.

Okay…..but when you say calorie restriction, does this mean I’m going to be hungry everyday I can’t deal with that!

No, absolutely not. You are actually going to be eating MORE often on Medifast than you would do on just about any other diet ( 6 meals per day) and the truth is, the meal replacements are SO filling it’s actually tough to be hungry at all! If you are like most of our readers, you will feel full, satisfied and enthusiastic on a daily basis about the kind of progress you are making for sure!