I looked at the products that they sell (salad dressings, bars, shakes, smoothies, powders, etc). The ingredient lists are not appealing at all. For example, their "Garden Fresh Italian Salad Dressing" contains water, red wine vinegar, canola oil, high fructose corn syrup, xanthan gum, unidentified 'natural' flavors that could be almost anything, and potassium benzoate, which is a preservative (and interestingly, also provides the whistling sound in fireworks!). "Garden Fresh". Yeah, right. How's that potassium benzoate crop doing? Most of their products contain multiple forms of sugar (disguised in fancy words). Their sloppy joe mix contains at least EIGHT different kinds of sugars, and 41 ingredients, including two food colors (caramel color and red dye #40)! Their foods are filled with guar gums, xanthan gums, fillers, and all kinds of artificial stuff.
When you rely on packaged, processed, artificial, sugary substitutes for food, you're not learning how to eat real food.
Imagine that you want to learn to play the piano. You employ a teacher. At your lesson, your teacher hands you DVDs. When you play them, the DVDs show a skilled pianist playing a complicated piano piece, and it's breathtakingly beautiful. Your teacher tells you to play the DVD several times and try to make your fingers copy the pianist's fingers, in the air (like playing an "air guitar"). Then you're given a piece of paper with piano keys drawn on it and told to try touching the paper. There, you're told, you're learning to play the piano. Wait just a hot minute! You'd demand your money back. You haven't been taught what the notes are, how chords are formed, how to hold your fingers, how to read music, what all those marks on the music page are (staff, clef, rests, quarter notes, etc).
That's the equivalent of these "eat our pre-packaged meals and bars and shakes and flavored powders and smoothies and cookies and you'll change your life" plans All you'll have done is you filled your body with junk and made somebody rich and you will never have learned about real food.
There's a program called Whole30. Nothing to buy (they do sell a book of their food philosophy but it's not necessary to purchase). They don't make products. There's nothing to join. It's about eating real food, in its recognizable form. For example: a zucchini. You don't mush it into a smoothie, disguise it in a brownie, make it into a pancake or cupcake or cookie. You eat the zucchini, roasted or steamed or broiled. You put fresh tomatoes on it, and seasonings like salt and fresh herbs. Another example: an avocado. You don't make it into chocolate pudding, or guacamole (using a store-bought mix which is mostly sugar and junk), or disguise it. You slice it and put a poached egg on it. You taste the zucchini. You taste the avocado. You can eat chicken, fish, eggs, bacon, most vegetables, most fruits. For the initial period, you eliminate some foods (dairy, grains...) Then you learn to add in things like plain organic Greek yogurt with fresh berries, instead of yogurt with colorful stripes in it and cookie crumbs to stir into it. You learn to add in healthy grains, raw local honey, some nuts and seeds. It doesn't have to be expensive.
There are lots of resources for Whole 30 online - forums, Facebook groups, recipes, support, etc. There are other programs that are similar: fresh, real food in its recognizable form.
I suggest that you learn all the names for sugar (easy to look up online - just google "many names for sugar". Prevention magazine has a list of 57 of them). Then stop using processed foods, packaged foods, convenience foods. Cook foods that you recognize. A tomato sauce? Don't buy a jar. Roast some tomatoes, peel their skins off with tongs (really simple after roasting them), crush them and season with a little salt and pepper (or not), and you have a beautiful roasted tomato sauce. It takes just seconds of preparation. Tacos? Don't buy the packet with sugars and junk. Make a homemade, very simple taco seasoning (simple spices - lots of recipes online), or season the ground beef or turkey with cumin and chili powder and keep it simple and tasty!
Then you will have learned how to eat to be healthy, to lose some weight, to get rid of the junk in your diet and you won't be making the Slim 4 Life people rich.
As an example, I made "chicken parmesan" last night. Usually it's chicken dredged in flour, dipped in eggs, breaded and fried, served with marinara sauce (often from a jar, with sugars), a big piece of mozzarella cheese and some parmesan cheese (often from a can, with fillers and cellulose), served over pasta. Instead, I roasted a big bunch of fresh green beans and tomatoes (seasoned with unrefined salt and some herbs), placed them in a pie plate, topped them with slices of chicken (left over from a chicken that I had roasted a day or two before), and shaved just a little fresh parmigiana cheese over the top. Because I wanted a little of that traditional crunch, I toasted a very small amount of Panko bread crumbs and sprinkled them over the top (just a tablespoon or two). It was delicious, all recognizable, and it was really good!
