I recently started the Medifast diet, and when I did, it took me a little while to understand exactly what people meant when they referred to Medifast. Were they talking about the website? The product? The shakes? Some sort of dietary movement? It took me several days of talking to people to really figure it out. The answer is, all of the above.

Medifast is a company that designed and manufactures a diet and accompanying foods, that owns a website (medifast.com), and that labels it’s concept, foods, and ideals with the Medifast name. “Medifast meals” are complete meals provided by the company, along with books, and kitchen appliances like Medifast blenders and shakers. They do own and run a few clinics, but not many compared to the number of followers they have.

The company and its diet have been around for more than two decades. Developed by doctors that were preparing obese patients for safe surgeries, it worked so well that it was expanded, modified, and made public as the diet that is so popular today. Respected institutions like the Johns Hopkins University have studied the Medifast diet.

Similarly, many well-known celebrities endorse Medifast, among them Kristie Swanson from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Genie Francis from General Hospital. Despite it’s long-standing reputation, many people have an incomplete understanding of the nature of the Medifast diet.

It’s more than just shakes and bars. There are more than 70 separate foods on the diet’s menu, and those are just the simple things you can do with them. It’s easy, for example, to combine the Medifast eggs with the Medifast pudding and create some excellent baked dishes that come out like cake or muffins, but within the plan’s limits. Since you must eat six times every day on this diet, it’s important to have the kind of variety that they offer.

Just to keep you on your toes — well, OK, not JUST to keep you on your toes, it’s also because it’s healthier — the company asks you to put together one off-menu meal every day. Of course, they do ask you to stick to fresh, mostly-raw foods, to keep your nutrient level high. It’s a challenge to get all of the nutrients you need in six 100-calorie meals, so their menu is carefully planned to make sure it can happen.

The idea behind the diet is that, by severely curtailing your intake of carbohydrates and increasing your intake of protein, your body is forced to burn fat for energy. They don’t ask you to give up your sweet tooth, though — the pudding, some of the shakes, and several of the optional drinks all have excellently sweet flavors.

The real power of the Medifast program, though, comes from its convenience. They sell each and every food product individually or in pre-packaged groups that go well together. I prefer the latter because it’s not only cheaper, but easier to deal with as well.

Hopefully now you know what to think of when you think of Medifast. And if you think that perhaps this well-researched and highly successful diet is for you, just head over to Medifast and check it out!

If you’re struggling to lose fat — not just weight, but actual body fat — and you haven’t tried the Medifast diet, you need to. The hustle-and-bustle of life often calls on you to sacrifice a “real” meal in favor of a cheeseburger-on-the-go, but the effects these decisions make on your waistline (and eventually your overall health) are devastating.

Enter the Medifast diet. Many, many diet programs have come out claiming to help you lose fat, and many of them even use the same basic theory as the Medifast diet. The difference is convenience.
The Theory

When you eat carbs, your body burns carbs for energy — and then any carbs that aren’t burned for energy are turned into fat and stuck to your butt. When your body doesn’t eat carbs, you enter a metabolic state called ketosis where your body gives up on carbs and burns fat for energy instead. If you don’t eat carbs OR fat, your body tries to burn fat for energy, but is required to draw on your fat reserves rather than on fat that you eat.

(Don’t be concerned that protein also has calories in it — 99% of protein isn’t ever burned for calories; it goes to build and rebuild muscle and organ tissues instead.)

The Medifast diet is custom-crafted to keep your body in a state of ketosis over long periods of time by limiting your carbohydrate intake — but also to keep your fat intake down, forcing your body to ‘eat’ it’s own fat reserves in order to have energy.
The Convenience

The main reason that people fail when they try other low-carb diets is that it’s horribly inconvenient. The simple fact is that all of our easy-to-eat foods come in carbohydrate-based ‘vehicles’ like bread, tortillas, and pasta. The physician that developed Medifast noticed that, and came up with a startlingly long list of ways that foods can be made convenient to prepare and eat without relying on carbohydrates to get the good stuff into your mouth.

So the Medifast diet has over 70 foods that can be combined in a billion different ways to make a huge variety of meals. Since you’ll be eating six times every day, that’s very important to the diet’s success!

The Stages of The Medifast Diet

There are three phases of the Medifast diet: the 5&1 stage, the Transition Stage, and the Maintenance Stage.

The 5&1 stage simply means that you eat 5 meals straight off of the Medifast menu every day, and 1 that you make yourself, provided it’s composed primarily of fresh fruits and veggies. It’s referred to as the ‘lean and green’ meal, because it should always have lean protein like a chicken breast, and green vegetables. This stage is designed to get your body to adapt to the diet, and lasts a few weeks.

The Transition stage lasts quite a while, and basically is the time it takes you to learn the principles behind the Medifast menu, and create your own version that conforms to your tastes. The idea here is basically to prepare you for the next stage. The list of foods that you can add to your diet starts very small, and increases over time as your body keeps adapting.

The Maintenance stage lasts for the rest of your life, and basically consists of you applying the Medifast principles to your everyday diet, without having to keep spending money on the Medifast prepared foods.

As you can tell, the Medifast diet isn’t a short-term or fad diet. It’s a lifestyle change, carefully crafted over 20 years of expertise to make the change from your current dietary failure into a perfect diet an easy one. Check out the Medifast diet for yourself today!

Look Better and Save Cash with Medifast Coupons

Millions of people check out the Medifast diet every year, but many are turned off because of the cost — but that cost can easily be reduced to managable levels with Medifast coupons.

Let’s face it, looking great and having a positive attitude is worth any amount of money. But in today’s economy, it seems like sometimes it’s a question of trading your health for your car payment. Fortunately, the people at Medifast see the delimma, and have responded. But before we look at the Medifast coupons, let’s look at Medifast itself.
The Medifast Diet

The Medifast diet works on the principle of ketosis — basically, if you don’t eat sugar, your body is forced to burn fat for calories; if you don’t eat any fat, either, your body has to hunt down the fat that it has stored and burn THAT for calories. Thus, you get thinner.

So the Medifast physicians have carefully crafted foods that replace your typical munchies with low-carb, low-fat variations that still maintain plenty of flavor. At first, you have to buy their foods and eat them for five out of the six daily meals that the Medifast diet requires you to eat. There’s pretty strict guidelines for what that sixth meal allows as well.

Fortunately, there’s a huge variety of foods available for purchase, including favorite snack foods like pudding, shakes, chili, and more. They want you to be able to enjoy something appropriate to any circumstance, from a nice dinner-by-candlelight with your significant other to watching the game with the guys.

Ideally, the plan will net you about a thousand calories each day, and provide you with complete nutrition while doing so. Diabetics have their own custom-crafted options to ease them off of insulin while helping them lose weight as well.

If you need to lose a significant amount of weight, the Medifast diet can do that, generally at a rate of between eight and twenty pounds every month for as long as you need. Keep in mind that some people have health issues that might keep them from participating, such as serious liver or kidney diseases, people taking certain medications, and people that are very young or very old.

The Medifast Coupons

The beauty of the Medifast diet is that it’s designed to help you STOP needing the premade, purchased food that they sell. The idea is that you will only need those foods for a few weeks while your body adapts to a state of continuous ketosis, and then they train you to choose the right ‘normal’ foods so that you don’t have to keep paying them forever. For that reason, a one-time coupon is often all you need to get past the ‘pricey’ part of the diet and move on to the next phase.

The Medifast coupons generally provide a discount of between sixteen and twenty percent off of the price of the foods. There are always different coupons being tested by the company, because they want to best serve their clients. This is the best place to check for live ones: Medifast Coupons. Check the Medifast coupons out and get started on your path to weight loss today!