Is The New Lifestyle Diet Like Optifast?

Optifast and the New Lifestyle diet are both weight loss programs that utilize meal replacements to help you manage your caloric intake and reduce your weight. Learning about both programs can help you decide if either could be right for you, allowing you to make an educated choice between them. Consult your physician prior to embarking on any weight loss program.

New Lifestyle Diet

The New Lifestyle diet includes three meals and three snacks per day. Women eat approximately 1,080 calories per day and men eat approximately 1,230 calories per day. Two meals and all three snacks each day consist entirely of meal replacements. Dinner includes 8 oz. of lean meat and two cups of vegetables for women. Men eat the same dinner with the addition of a meal replacement bar.

Weekly lessons are e-mailed to you. These lessons are designed to teach you how to apply the concepts of nutrition and how to modify your behavior and relationship with food to ensure that you maintain your weight loss.

Optifast

The Optifast diet provides 800 calories per day, qualifying it as a very-low-calorie diet. The diet consists of six high-protein meal replacement shakes and no solid food. After a minimum of 12 weeks on the diet, you begin to replace some of your meal replacement shakes with solid food. As you learn more about nutrition and portion sizes from your assigned weight loss coach, you are instructed to reduce the number of meal replacements you consume each day and replace them with sensible meals.

Similarities and Differences

Both Optifast and the New Lifestyle diet incorporate meal replacements. Optifast requires you to start the diet by consuming only the meal replacements for at least 12 weeks, whereas the New Lifestyle diet includes one traditional meal each day.

Both the New Lifestyle diet and Optifast educate you on nutrition and weight management. The New Lifestyle diet provides this education in the form of weekly lessons. Optifast assigns a weight loss coach to teach you this information.

Considerations

Diets that rely heavily on meal replacements have a tendency to cause boredom in dieters. Boredom often leads to eating foods with empty calories, causing weight loss to slow or stop completely. Diets containing fewer than 1,200 calories per day should only be followed under the supervision of a physician, according to "Handbook of Obesity Treatment," because too few calories can result in a sluggish metabolism, which can lead to difficulty losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight.