Meal Replacements for Busy People: Are They Actually Helpful?
If you are trying to lose weight, it is easy to initially think that this means you need to allocate a lot of time to cooking separate meals for you and your family, weighing everything before it passes your lips and even rigorous time-consuming exercise routines. Whilst some diets, of course, are like that, others are perfect for busy lifestyles such as meal replacement diets.
Meal replacements – the good and the bad
Some meal replacement products on the market are designed with nutrition in mind and contain a huge variety of vitamins, minerals, protein etc to form part of a healthy diet. Other products are simple low-calorie bars or shakes designed to fill your tummy until the next meal.
If you use meal replacements on a regular basis, then ensuring they are nutritious is really important. Every vitamin and mineral our body needs is essential for something, and often if we do not have them for a while it is more noticeable. It can be thought that we feel ok, but something isn’t quite right in our bodies, and by the time we discover this, our body has been lacking in these nutrients for some time.
The best meal replacements are not always the same for everyone so it is always worth checking who the target market it. For example, some high-protein shakes and products are designed more as an addition to healthy diets for those building muscles at the gym and are not actually designed to replace meals.
My experience with meal replacements
I’ve tried meal replacements myself, most notably when I tried the Optifast programme.
What I discovered was that I liked them much more as a convenient option for certain meals than as a complete replacement for normal food.
For example, I can see the appeal on a hectic morning when the alternative might be skipping breakfast altogether or grabbing something purely because it’s convenient.
What suited me much less was replacing every normal meal. I missed sitting down to eat, I missed different textures and I missed eating the same dinner as everyone else.
That’s why I think it’s worth separating two ideas.
Using a meal replacement because it makes a busy day easier isn’t necessarily the same thing as following a total meal-replacement diet.
If you’re considering Optifast specifically, I’ve written much more about my experience of the Optifast diet and why I switched from total to partial meal replacement.
Fitting meal replacements into your lifestyle
It is really easy to fit meal replacements into a busy lifestyle. Depending on the products you consider they can usually be made in minutes and stored for a while until you need them.
Here are 6 tips to help you fit meal replacements into your lifestyle:
- If you usually have a sandwich or pasty for lunch then swapping to an Optifast bar is really easy.
- Do you enjoy an evening meal with the family? Trying a meal replacement diet does not need to stop this. You could do a partial meal replacement diet like the Optifast partial meal replacement and still enjoy a healthy evening meal.
- If you find sticking to diets hard because you have to weigh and measure foods then swapping to the shakes, desserts, soups and bars from Optifast would take away that difficulty. All you would need to measure is water for the mixing.
- People in busy jobs that are not based in one place often find making their shake in the morning is helpful and then wherever they are at lunchtime they can have it without having to add water and shake it then.
- Those of you who are always rushing about in the morning (like me!) you could either choose that meal replacement as a bar and eat it on the go or perhaps make a shake the night before?
- Remember every day does not need to be the same. It is ok to replace all your meals today and just one tomorrow. Do what works for you.
