Slim-Fast Diet has it's ups & downs

by Kelly Ansari
(New York City, NY, USA)

I have tried the Slim-Fast diet a few different times in my life. A couple of times I only managed to do it for a few weeks to a month maximum, but the main time I tried it I gave it a good 4 months or so.

On paper it was very easy to do -- just eat the Slim-Fasts for two meals, and have another meal of food that is sensible. They also allowed you a couple snacks per day if they were the snacks made by Slim-Fast.

It was definitely easy to understand, and the shakes were easy because there was no cooking involved! I liked that part -- in regard to their shakes & snack bars at the least, having no cooking involved there was a big plus for me.

I'm on the go a lot (plus, I hate cooking) and that was very convenient. When I was on it, they also made microwavable pasta dishes (I do not know if they still have these items) for meals... the pasta tasted very good, but it was hard for me to find the time or to be at home to pop them in the microwave. (Yes, I'm really that lazy when it comes to cooking!)

There were times on the Slim-Fast system where I would get very hungry, and there was also a bit of an odd, unexpected problem -- when I'd get hungry, I wouldn't crave my favorite 'real' foods. I would get hungry for the Slim-Fast products!

A few of their items taste so good to me that they tasted almost too good and I would crave them... I had some problems with cheating on the diet -- but only with more of the Slim-Fast, not even with 'real' food! The shakes & the snack bars tasted that good to me.

Even when I'm not on the diet, sometimes I still have a taste for them or go to buy just one. I might just have odd taste buds, but the food tasted quite good. (Especially the French Vanilla out of the shakes -- I would recommend staying away from the Chocolate.)

The only time you could eat something else was during your "sensible meal," which they did seem to give guidelines on what would make a good or bad meal.

However, I must admit I took free license on that a few times in order to eat a meal that wasn't sensible at all -- things like fast food. Or there were times where I made my "sensible meal" another of the shakes or snack bars because they tasted so good to me!

It did make me stay away from eat-in restaurants totally during that time, and I had to make sure any of my dates or my outings were things that didn't involve food.

I honestly was able to work this okay and didn't really feel that part was a problem, I thought it actually made me think of more creative, different things to do when I would go out with my girlfriends, etc.

In the end, it did help me lose around 20 pounds or so -- enough that it was about 3 pants sizes down. I would have said I would do it again & recommend it to others for the most part, although recently there was a major recall of the shakes which makes me nervous about the safety of their products.

I would probably wait a year or so until I felt safe about their products again, and then I would possibly try it again if I needed to diet and I would also recommend it to others -- particularly to any others who do not like to cook food and think they may actually like the taste of the Slim-Fast foods.

Note from Dr. Dan

Unilever, the company that makes Slim-Fast products, announced a recall of Slim-Fast ready-to-drink shakes in cans on December 3, 2009.

Why the recall? Because they found that the product contained Bacillus cereus, a bacteria that causes vomiting and diarrhea.

Dr. Dan