I suspect that many people wonder if REAL people actually lose weight and keep it off by eating medifast foods and meals.  It can be hard to know if those success stories that we all see might be women who did not have a real life with a million things going on as most of us do.  I used to wonder about this myself, but I always hoped that some of the blogs that point to success (usually in the writer's own words) showed your everyday, normal people.

From my research, I did find evidence that this diet has been studied (at John Hopkins University, as just one example) and has been found to have a decent success rate for test subjects. This backs up my own personal experience. I believe that you don't have to look very far to see real people having success.  I suppose I am example of one of these.  And, I do have family, friends, and coworkers who have also lost impressive amounts of weight by eating this food.  And, I can tell you that we are all regular every day folks.  It might help to explain how (and why) I believe this diet works according to my own experiences.  Obviously, I can't tell you about the reality of others. I have no knowledge of this (other than what I read.)  But, I can and will tell you my theories as to how and why this worked for me, which I will do below.

Smaller, Special Meals, Eaten More Often, Equaled Weight Loss:  I believe that one of the reason that this diet worked so well for me was because it required for me to eat six times per day. I'll be honest, I did not embrace this at first.  I anticipated that this was going to be a huge pain and inconvenience.  I didn't realize, until I started assembling them, that the medifast meals are pretty much ready to go.  Yes, you may have to blend a shake or reconstitute some eggs.  But, the only time that you really have to sit down and shop for, plan for, or prepare a meal is when you turn your attention towards your "lean and green meal."

Now, having to fix this meal used to annoy me also.  I wanted to skip it.  But, I did understand that it was probably a good idea to make sure that I had fresh foods each day.  Even I knew that it probably would not be a good idea to just rely on the prepackaged foods.  And, the requirements for these are pretty easy to meet - just lean meat or some sort of protein and some vegetables.  You can put this all together in a the form of a soup or one skillet meal or stir fry or you can have your traditional meat and sides.

Now, as you may have suspected, the medifast meals are lower in calories than what you would normally be eating on your own.  Each of the meals varies slightly, but generally speaking, they try very hard to keep the calorie content around 90 -120.  And, they do keep the carbohydrate content low too.  So, just that alone is going to ensure that you are taking in less calories than you are burning out.  But, that's not even the whole idea yet.

There is more to these meals than just a low amount of calories.  They take it a step further by providing high amounts of protein and fiber in these meals.  This is for a few reasons.  It keeps you full.  It is more palatable.  But it also makes sure that your body is burning fat. 

What You Need To Know About The Medifast Meals:  I'm often asked if you can just incorporate a few shakes or medifast meals into your routine without going all out and eating five of them each day.  I don't have personal experience with this, but I would think that doing this would certainly save you some calories and carbs each day and that's certainly a huge plus that should theoretically lead to weight loss assuming that you don't overcompensate when you chose your own meals.  For example, if you consumed a few medifast shakes per day but then had lots of fast food at dinner, you might not get the results that you had hoped for.

To get in ketosis or the point where your body is rapidly going through fat, I believe that you really do need to replace most of your meals, which is the whole idea of this diet.  This is easily accomplished by trying one of their introductory packages.  But, you certainly can order the foods individually and just replace some of your meals as you feel like it.  This may not get you into ketosis, but it would most certainly save your calories and carbs, which would certainly be better than what you might be doing now.

All of my experience has been with those of us who have replaced all of our meals (except for the "lean and green") and our results have been pretty good.  But, I suspect that you would get results that go hand and hand with how many meals you replace and how sensible you are with the meals that you make for yourself.  However, the answer to the question, in terms of my experience, is that yes, people do lose weight by eating those medifast meals. I know this to be true because I am one of them.