I often write about my experiences on this diet over the past year, so I'm sometimes asked questions on the specifics of how it works. Yesterday, someone asked "how many calories are you allowed to eat per day on the Medifast diet?" I'll answer this question in the following article.
First, An Overview Of Medifast And How It Works: Before I go into the caloric content, I need to explain how the plan works. You'll be eating six times per day. Five of those meals are pretty much set because you'll be choosing and eating five meals that the company provides you with. These are basically pre made. You just have to assemble them. There are a lot of choices available, including the popular shakes and bars, eggs, oatmeal, soups and stews, chili, pudding, cappuccino, hot chocolate, latte, fruit drinks, chips, etc. In all, there's over 70 choices available.
But, once per day you will make your own larger, healthful meal called "the lean and green." The guidelines for this have you eating 5 - 7 ounces of lean meat or protein and 3 servings of vegetables. Obviously, the foods that you chose are going to impact your daily calories. The guidelines ensure that the "lean and green" is healthful, but there's going to be some differences in the caloric content depending upon the foods that you chose.
The Daily Amount Of Calories In The Medifast Diet: For the most part, a typical day on Medifast contains about 1,000 calories. Let's take a quick look at the caloric content of a typical day of meals. Below is chart to show you what I mean.
Meal 1 Oatmeal 100
Meal 2 Cappuccino 100
Meal 3 Chili 110
Meal 4 Chocolate Shake 90
Meal 5 Protein Bar 110
Grand Total 510 (About 500 calories left over for your lean and green meal)
As you can see, most of the foods are very similar in terms of how much they count toward your daily total. Because the protein bars are a little higher in carbs, they ask they you only consume at most two of those per day.
Protein Counts Too With This Diet: As you can see, the amount of calories is pretty low. But, another important part of this diet is that it's also very low in carbs and it's high in protein. This combination helps to put your body in ketosis since it doesn't have the excess carbohydrates available to burn. So, instead of carbs, your body will begin to burn it's own fat. I believe that this is why people often see pretty quick and dramatic results on this diet.
