Slim-Fast offers a 3-2-1 plan for weight loss with 1 meal, 2 Slim-Fast meal bars or shakes and 3 Slim-Fast snack bars or small food snacks each day. The plan promotes gradual weight loss, and the exact amount can vary depending on your individual characteristics and choices. If you need to lose weight, choose a diet that offers healthy options, and get your doctor's approval before starting any diet.
Calorie Balance
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains that your calorie balance weighs the calories that you take in against the calories you use, or burn. To lose weight, you need to create a negative calorie balance, or calorie deficit, by eating fewer calories than you burn. A calorie deficit of about 3,500 calories means that you can lose about one pound of body fat. The Slim-Fast plan provides about 1,200 calories per day, and your individual rate of weight loss will depend on how many calories you expend.
Individual Factors
The amount of weight that you can lose on Slim-Fast depends partly on your resting metabolic rate, or the amount of calories that you use for vital functions such as breathing and circulating your blood. You burn more calories, or have a higher metabolic rate, if you are male, a younger adult and heavier than if you are female, an older adult and a lighter individual. These are factors that you cannot control in your day-to-day life.
Exercise
Your level of physical activity is the component of your calorie expenditure that you can control the most, and you can increase your exercise to burn more calories. MayoClinic.com estimates that in one hour, a 200-pound individual would burn about 346 calories from walking, 364 calories from water aerobics or 637 calories from swimming laps. Slim-Fast recommends making physical activity part of your everyday life, and finding activities that you enjoy so that you continue to participate.
Healthy Rate
For most people, a healthy rate of weight loss is about one to two pounds per week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You can achieve this rate with a calorie deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories per day, and this moderate rate may be a better goal than a faster rate because it allows you to make gradual changes in your eating to develop healthy habits that can last for the rest of your life.
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