Finally, Some Sense In The Diet Shake Craze

There has been some news locally in the last couple of days about the diet shake phenomenon and finally a respected company have come out and made sense of it all.

The very popular Choice website which provides "trusted information for Australian consumers" according to their website blurb has hit the nail on the head.

This is what they had to say about the latest craze of people using diet shakes to help them lose weight.

I'll follow with my 2 cents afterwards.

CHOICE investigation (taken from the website http://www.choice.com.au)

To anonymously assess these programs CHOICE sent three overweight people to a selection of pharmacies offering seven different diet programs, and asked a panel of experts to assess our findings.

All the pharmacy plans involve a weekly visit to your pharmacy consultant and a diet that restricts carbohydrates to some extent. All except Ultra Lite use meal replacements to keep your intake in check. The basics of each program are shown in the table.

Programs we looked at:

AlphaSlim Pharmacy Weight Loss
Betty Baxter Complete Weight Management
Dr. Tim’s Success
Kate Morgan Weight Loss
MediTrim
Tony Ferguson Weight Loss
Ultra Lite Weight Management
Xndo Weight Control System

Finally, the final opinion by Choice:

"Pharmacy diet plans may help to shed extra kilos quickly, but most fail to deal effectively with the complex broader issues around weight loss.
CHOICE cannot recommend these programs until consultants improve their training and move beyond the “one-size-fits-all” approach".

My 2 Cents:

Round of applause there Choice. Well sort of.

Yes, diet shakes work but people need to know the real reason why.

When you take away real food for any amount of time and replace it with a calorie controlled shake people get results as they are eating a whole lot less calories.

What happens when they go back to eating real food?

Just ask anyone who has tried these shakes.

Tell me about it, I have tried to get family members and clients off these things.

My Secret Guide to Smart Eating pulls no punches in an honest review of the nutrition content of one of the above mentioned diet shakes.

The other thing that really gets me is that people are going to "weight management consultants" in chemists after only 3 hours of training in some instances. See the table here for how long each company trains their staff for.

Unbelievable isn't it.

How can someone with 3 hours of training, or even 2 days for that matter on the upper end of the scale, give diet advice?

No formal qualifications, no real world experience, just a couple of hours of biased information from the company that peddles the rubbish?

Nothing great is easy. That means weight loss too. So unfortunately, diet shakes or any other short cut are simply that. You cannot cheat your way to weight loss.

Give the diet shakes the flick and only then will you experience long lasting weight loss that works.

See this video for my no-holds barred critique if you want more reasons, and don't forget to leave your comments!