Optifast: Fast But Not Permanent Results
Written: Jun 15 '00 (Updated Jun 15 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Oh You will Lose the Weight Fast, but at What cost??
Cons: All Liquid Diet which Causes you to go absolutely Insane, and worse of all the weight comes back!
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| sweetcece's Full Review: Optifast Program |
Over a decade ago, I was evaluated and accepted by the Optifast program. I participated in this program for close to nine months, and I personally will tell you that this was nine months of living hell.
Optifast is a liquid diet only diet. And believe me, it gives you wonderful and great results. Your weight will be gone, literally falling from your body. The results are dramatic as in my case where I lost twenty-one pounds in less than three weeks. Eventually, I believe I lost about sixty or seventy pounds using this program, and now I have gained all of that back and then some.
What went wrong?
I'll explain. Optifast only works if you have these criteria in place. First, you have a ton of money to spend on the program. It is not cheap, and even though some insurance companies may pay for part of the program, many will not. Next, I know absolutely for a fact that if you are married having to cook dinners for anyone in your family or have any type of social life, you can not be on this diet, be sane, and have peace.
I know this because I tried to do it. I was married trying to do this diet and trying to cook. There is absolutely no way to be on any diet when you have to prepare food that is not on the diet for other people. Optifast is probably the worst diet to be on because you do not eat anything at all, but drink liquid drinks for the entire time.
And if anyone out here thought SLIMFAST tastes nasty? They should dry these shakes. They are absolutely horrid. They are powdered and you have to add either water or milk to them. I learned to make them in the blender with tons of ice and added chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla extracts to them so that they would have some kind of taste to them. Otherwise these are the most horrible tasting things you could ever put in your mouth. They have a "twang" and it makes you want to be sick. However, my parents were paying the "co-payment" that the insurance company wouldn't pay so I didn't want to disappoint them and I endured this mess.
Eventually, I was able to have a "treat" with this shake plan because I had lost so much weight and that was to have a sugar-free snowcone once a week. This snow-cone place was across the street from Optifast, and I often wondered if they were on cohoots with those folks because they surely had a booming business. Other than that, you did not eat anything at all.
Imagine drinking some shakes for months at a time and then trying to be around people with food and food situations. It will make you absolutely insane and crazy. You can't even have a social life like that, because most of our culture revolves around food! You become a recluse of sorts, only going to Optifast, running and doing any other kind of exercise to get your mind off of food because you can't read any paper, watch any movie, or anything because everything is filled with food related ques and suggestions. I found I couldn't cook without tasting and this really did me in. I wanted to binge so bad, but I couldn't because of the money factor.
Also, when you're on a liquid diet like this you will get constipation, and you will lose some of your hair. Imagine your hair getting thinner and then you possibly getting somewhat bald! Being bald may be sexy for men, but I have yet to see many sexy bald headed women!
Eventually, when you got to your goal on Optifast, they started adding food do your diet. But when you got to that point you had really become somewhat crazy dealing with avoiding food all together and found yourself not being able to eat anything without being sick.
When you are on the Optifast plan, you will go to counseling sessions that are designed to help you learn to adjust your behavior. I found most of these things a joke because how can you change your lifestyle when you're on a plan that has literally destroyed your previous lifestyle eating plan abruptly by putting you on liquid food and then getting you back to eating food allegedly in an orderly manner where you will not gain your weight back. It's like shock therapy, but in this case, I have two instances that I can prove to you that this does not work.
First of all, I am one of these instances. I gained all of my weight back and more after I got off of this diet. I was miserable when I was on it, and then after that I became pregnant twice and the weight stayed on.
However a more dramatic example is a woman that I knew from high school who was on the plan the same time as I was. She had been overweight from the moment that I knew her in elementary school. However, she had lost all of this weight from being on this plan and looked like something from a fashion plate. When I saw here there during one of the counseling sessions, I didn't even recognize her. About five years later though, she had gained all of her weight back and more and was having health problems.
Because of all of the reasons I have stated before in this epinion, I truly do not recommend this plan to anyone unless they are truly extremely morbidly obese to the point where they are going to die if they don't get the weight off immediately. This is a worthless plan, dangerous, and accomplishes nothing but misery.
Recommended:
No
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sweetcece
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