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Friday, May 16, 2008

Medifast For Teens Or Kids? My Modified Version That Has Worked

Let me disclose right upfront that I am not a doctor, but I have lost almost 50 pounds on medifast. A couple of months ago, I was approached by a coworker who had three pretty overweight children, who frankly were approaching being obese. After seeing my results, and noticing that I'd been able to eat snack type foods, my coworker wanted to know if medifast could work for her kids and her teenage daughter.

There's not much data available on using the medifast diet on kids or teens and I knew that children are still growing so it probably was not a good idea to severely limit or restrict their calories. But I also knew that some of this diet's foods are very carb and snack like, and I knew that she was having trouble controlling the snacks that her kids ate. In particular, the kids were very fond of junk foods and candy.

A light bulb went off in my head. I figured maybe we could start with just encouraging the kids to eat a medifast bar, pudding or shake when they reached for a junk food snack. In essence, we were trading the high sugar, high calorie candy bars and fast foods for something equivalent from the diet's offerings. Since these kids snacked several times per day, we were saving a lot of calories this way. Initially, we left their regular meals alone, just using medifast as snack substitutes. We ordered one variety package (and are getting ready to order another) and this lasted us a good while and was not much more expensive than junk food.

The kids handled this pretty well. Luckily, most of the medifast snack foods are really good, so it was not a big stretch to eat a protein bar rather than a candy bar or medifast pudding or crackers rather than chips. We always made sure we took the food out of the wrapper so they didn't have to walk around advertising they were eating diet foods.

The kids started to see some results after only a few weeks. As their enthusiasm increased even more, we decided to see if we could replace more of their daily empty calories with medifast. However, we were very careful not to restrict their calories or food choices. Basically, we added one medifast element at every meal and had them eat that in addition to and before their regular meal.

For instance for breakfast we would offer them medifast oatmeal or eggs to start. They would eat that and then if they were still hungry they could eat their regular sugary cereal breakfast if they wanted. For lunch, they'd have the diet's soup or chili before they dove into the pizza or burgers. (We'd pack this in a thermos so no one knew they were eating diet food.) And we started preparing lean and green meals for dinner. We still let them eat a bit of their regular favorite foods at dinner, but just not nearly as much.

What we hoped would happen did. The kids got filled up on medifast so they didn't eat as much of their junk and low quality foods and they continue to see really dramatic results. The teen is now able to self regulate what she eats and has cut out a lot of junk. We still don't allow them to rely solely on the diet for their calories. That may be too drastic for kids, but the teen in particular is now making really good choices with the food that she eats in addition to medifast.

I think the reason this worked is because the medifast snack foods are really tasty and kid friendly and we never restricted what the kids ate. We never told them they couldn't have anything. We just had them eat medifast first. We were adding food instead of taking it away, but by doing this, they were actually eating less bad foods because they were filling up on medifast.

I would never advocate replacing medifast for a kid or teen's entire caloric intake. However, in this case, substituting the diet's foods for junk food snacks or poor food choices has been quite effective and much easier than I thought. My coworker is very grateful and is now on medifast herself.

Lindsey Price is approaching a 50 pound weight loss on Medifast. Learn how she helped three kids lose 80 combined pounds by clicking here to view the Kids And Teens Weight Loss Website