I sometimes get emails from people who are considering trying the Medifast diet, but they have concerns and hesitations because, although they may have lost a decent amount of weight on other diets, they always seem to gain it back in the end.  How can be it be worth all of the sacrifice and hard work if you're only going to be back to where you started anyway?  Many people accept gaining some of the weight back as just an inevitable reality.  I don't think that this has to be the case at all.  I'll explain what I mean (and why) in the following article.

Why Some People Gain The Weight Back On Diets: I believe that the reason some folks eventually end up at their old weight is because the new lifestyle that the diet had you on is just not realistic.  The expectations are too high.  If a diet is overly restrictive and you can't live this way long term, then the second you revert back to normal eating, then you may well revert back to your normal weight.

You must permanently overcome whatever was wrong before to ensure that you're going to keep the weight off and these factors could be a combination of medical or self esteem problems, unhealthy emotional issues with food, or other factors.  Whatever it was that was keeping you overweight must be identified and addressed in order to be assured that this same problem is not just going to sabotage you when you go off of Medifast.

What You Must Learn On The Medifast Diet In Order To Keep The Weight Off:  I firmly believe that in order to have long term success, there are several things that you must learn from your experience on Medifast. They are:

1. Eating frequently should become a habit.  This diet has you eating every 2 - 3 hours which works out to be six times per day.  This helps both your metabolism and your hunger level.  In order to keep the weight off, you should keep up with this schedule.  You should continue to eat small, frequent meals because going back to three larger meals is leaving you room for over eating and for a thwarted metabolism.

2. You should learn how to plan and prepare healthy meals as the result of your lean and green meal.   When you are on Medifast, you will prepare and consume one larger meal each day.  The remaining five of your meals are made for you, but they do require you to plan for and then prepare a "lean and green meal" every day and they want for this meal to contain lean protein and three servings of low glycemic vegetables.  While completing this, you'll collect a lot of recipes and you'll learn how to make quick work of this requirement, which is so important because you'll want to make more than one lean and green meal throughout the day once you go off of Medifast. I firmly believe if you take everything that you learned about the lean and green and then apply that once you're off the diet, then you will be just fine.

3.  You must continue to look at food in a different way.  I think that one of the best things about Medifast was that it forced me to see food in a different and healthier way.  Before I started this diet, I was almost using food as medication or as a coping mechanism.  If I got depressed, I would eat. If I got bored, I'd eat.  If I was wanting to celebrate, I would eat.  I thought about food all the time.  I fretted over what I would eat at my next meal.  In short, it was a central part of my life.  But, this is not true anymore.  Because when most of your meals are provided for you and they don't change all that much, then there is no reason to obsess about this anymore.  In a sense, this really changed my relationship with food, which was something that had needed to happen for a very long time.

4.  Your eating and lifestyle changes must become a habit.  Most behavioral specialists will tell you that in order for something to become a habit, you must do it repetitively for about thirty days. I think that you may need a bit longer than this when it comes to food.  However long it takes, your new life style must become a habit so that you really don't think too much about it anymore.  It must become so common to you that you really wouldn't think about doing things any differently.