Meal Replacement Shakes – Are they Good or Bad?
Question:
I have a meal replacement shake (Isowhey) that I take, is that OK?
Short answer:
For a healthy person who makes generally good food decisions for themselves and their families, this product is unnecessary, and more than likely detrimental to your health and weight loss goals. These products are made for obese, lazy people who lack the willpower to give up their junk food addiction. They have this instead of a milkshake, or a packet of chips. This product does not suit any of you girls.
Long, fun answer:
Here’s how to logically work it out for yourselves:
Marketing tells you that it will help you lose weight by eating it.
Most people who buy it, will be having it for one of three reasons?
• to promote weight loss
• curb your hunger
• convenience (too busy)
Let’s look at it logically – we’ll eliminate the clever marketing (rip off the colourful label) – so we can uncover one of the greatest scams on earth.
Promote weight loss
We all know that the major contributing factor to weight loss is burning more fuel than you eat. There are other factors, but they are all accelerators or decelerators. Any nutrition expert will agree that calories in less than calories out is the best place to start. So to lose weight, look at everything you eat in one day (imagine putting it all on the table in a pile), now take some away and just eat what’s left. Logical, right?
Well, these supplement guys have some how got us convinced that the best way to burn fat, is to add something to our diet. That’s like telling you that the best way to get rid of the bath water is to turn on a second tap.
When it comes to any athletic problem, the first thing we look at is the athlete’s nutrition. The athlete’s question is always “what should I take.” A far more important question is “what should I take away“.
And when I say athlete, I mean anybody who is doing something physical with a goal in mind. A mum who’s goal is fat loss is exactly the same as a professional sports person who’s goal is more speed.
Find out what’s holding you back first, otherwise you just accelerate the problem.
To put it bluntly, it’s what we have been eating that’s caused us to get fat, not what we haven’t been eating.
Curb your hunger
Once you’re full, you’re no longer hungry. Full is therefore the opposite of hunger. So to curb your hunger, you need to feel full. We’re all pretty good at feeling full, but our problem is that we can’t stay full for long enough. The problem is therefore time.
So we need to find something that makes us feel full for longer. This means we need to find something that takes a long time to digest. Something solid would therefore take longer to digest than a liquid?
How on earth then have these guys managed to convince us that drinking something can keep us full for longer than eating something.
Convenience
the only other reason to be having a meal replacement shake is convenience. If the options are McDonalds, or this, well – this would be a better option. Unless there isn’t a supermarket close by.
I don’t even need to get into the ingredients list, and how you’re paying way too much for a cheaply broken down version of cottage cheese, pumped full of enough heavy metals to be visibly separated with a magnet. The sugar content is high enough to cause an insulin spike (which is felt as hunger), and the ingredient they use to make you feel full looks very much like a trans fat.*
Solution:
eat real, unprocessed foods not chemicals. Meat, veggies, fruit nuts and seeds. The beauty of this is you can eat as much as you want with no guilt.
*Trans fats (very bad fats) and unsaturated fats (good fats) can both be triglycerides. It’s just that one (trans fat) is made artificially and is very sinister. In this product, triglycerides are listed separately in the ingredients list to fat. If it were unsaturated fat (a good fat), the company would be telling you, proudly. But they’ve called them triglycerides.