Imagine! The secret to losing weight is as simple as chugging a drink that leaves you feeling full, so you can enjoy a healthy, well-balanced meal later that day. Just squeeze in a few snacks throughout the day, lose weight quickly and feel better than ever. Sounds wonderful right?
That’s the illusion that diet-food giants like SlimFast create, and while it’s a compelling dream the cold hard truth is that the slimfast diet is neither healthy nor a long-term solution to weight loss.
What is Slimfast?
The secret to how SlimFast “works” is that you replace two meals a day with shakes or- even worse- smoothies and protein bars. You ‘” indulge” in three 100-calorie snacks throughout the day and then finish the day with a 500-calorie meal of your choice. So you are eating “little and often” throughout the day and never allowing your sugar and insulin levels to drop – both of which are key to entering “fat burning” mode and, therefore, sustainable weight loss.
Bad Ingredients
The ingredients that make up the SlimFast shakes are the first thing we need to look at, especially because their ingredients list is a mile long and half of it is gibberish ingredients that we have never heard of.
Lets take the ‘SlimFast Advanced Nutrition Creamy Chocolate Shake’ for an example, these are just a few example ingredients that are harmful to our health…
Canola Oil. Is canola oil bad for you? Yes, yes it is. Canola oil is full of GMOs (genetically modified organism). Plus, Canola oil is also a partially hydrogenated oil which means it is highly processed. This can cause a lot of trans fat to be produced which raises your blood pressure, damages your blood vessels, is carcinogenic and literally poisons the mitochondria (these are the energy-generating batteries that power every cell)
Maltodextrin. Maltodextrin (it’s a sugar) and itd another ingredient that is extremely processed, it is primarily used to thicken foods or liquids but it is also a preservative to make processed foods last longer. It is a cheap ingredient that is found in a lot of our everyday products, anything from salad dressing to body lotion.
Plus, Slimfast is high in sugar which will cause your sugar levels to spike dramatically, then crash!
Why else is SlimFast bad for you?
For starters, it’s simply not sustainable. Although you may drop some weight quickly, it doesn’t set you up for success. Your body will always be craving more sugar after your shakes which will only lead to you snacking on their highly-processed bars that are packed with………….. yet more sugar.
As well all know, the sugar will eventually make you fat, and because SlimFast foods are so full of sugar, you might be “running a hamster wheel” when it comes to keeping the weight off.
Sugar not only spikes your insulin which forces your body to store energy – not ideal when you want to lose weight.. it also has a knock-on effects on leptin, the satiety hormone which is produced by our fat cells. As our fat cells become stuffed with fat, they secrete more leptin, which tells the brain that we’re full and don’t need more food. (“Stop eating”)
Remember that the liver converts excess sugar to fat, which is stored in your fat cells. More sugar. More fat. More leptin! Eventually your brain becomes resistant to leptin, so it never receives the “you’re full now” signal so it keeps wanting more food in the vain hope of finally getting that “I’m full” signal! So you get fatter AND hungrier at the same time.
Finally, SlimFast is all calorie based so creates an unhealthy relationship with food. You have probably heard the phrase ‘calories in, calories out’ when it comes to weight loss but this is not an effective way to lose weight. Although you might be burning the energy, you end up consuming an excess of sugar and carbs which inevitably cause weight gain in the longer term.
Its SO much easier to lose weight if you aren’t stressing over calories. It’s amazing how, when you remove artificial calorie-counting restrictions from the equation, and replace the unhealthy sugary carb-laden foods in your diet with healthy fats and satiating protein, your hunger melts away and you naturally eat less. ( To read more about the risks of calorie counting, click here to read our blog www.prolongevity.co.uk/blog/calorie-counting
We all know that trying to lose weight and get in shape is tough. There really is no quick fix, and products like SlimFast aren’t going to help you reach your healthy potential. They’re formulated and then marketed to keep you buying them. After all, if solutions like SlimFast actually worked, the companies that produce them would be out of business by now, since no one would have trouble losing weight.
Choosing the right foods and micronutrients will make you feel so much better in the long run — and the way you look will reflect that, too. That’s the ProLongevity promise