We've all heard of them, seen commercials for them, or even been tempted to try them ourselves, but do those diets that we see everywhere on TV actually work. You know the diets I am referring to, some of the more popular ones boast that you have the possibility of losing 5 pounds in two weeks simply by eating their products while others offer more of a lifestyle change and use their products to help jumpstart that change.Working for SWOPT, I see what exerise can do for our patients that have hurt themselves or just want to have a better sense of fitness. All of our clinical staff have been very highly educated on nutrition and I have learned a lot from their expertise. However, I have been struggling to lose weight myself and always saw those commercials and thought, could it work for me? I went ahead and tried some popular plans and will discuss my results with them in this series of blogs. The first one I will discuss is the Yoplait Two Week Tune Up.
When I decided to do the two week tune up I first visited their website to find out what the challenge would be. When you first go to the website you can set up your own plan and customize it based on the foods and yogurt flavors you like the best or you can get a plan randomly selected for you. I tend to be picky with my foods when I do diets so I choose to do the customized version of their plan. After I followed all the steps it took me to the end page where it had a printable version of the plan and also a grocery list to take with you to the store. I printed out the two week plan and then made my grocery list based on that.
The plan calls for eating breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner and then 3 servings of nonfat dairy everyday. The nonfat dairy included skim milk or another yoplait so I chose to have two glasses of milk and an extra yogurt everyday for my plan. Breakfast annd Lunch were a yogurt, a fruit, and a serving of a whole grain cereal like cheerios or rice chexs for the most part. The snack was a couple servings of veggies like tomatos and cucumbers. Dinner was a very nutrious dinner of a lean protien and they had lists of receipes with each item.
The plan was very easy to shop for and really cut down my grocery bill because the yogurt for for two of the meals and each yogurt was only 50 cents when I got them on sale. I work 4 days a week at SWOPT and work 10 hour shifts each day which is wonderful for me but it can be a big problem for lunches and staying healthy so the great thing about this plan was that the food was easy to take to work and the dinners were very easy to fix. The dinners were also very delicious and it made the diet that much better.
The negatives of the diet were that the food got a little boring after awhile and I really started to miss eating more for lunch than just yogurt and fruits. I found myself pretty hungry everyday right before dinnertime and that made my desire to cheat and go off the diet very strong and difficult to control.The diet was also very strict and made it so I was not able to go out to eat at all.
All in all, the diet did what it was advertised to do, in two weeks I lost a total of 3 pounds which is not a lot but considering a healthy weight lose is 1-2 pouns a week this one came right in the middle of that normal range. I would recommend the tune up for anyone that just wants to jumpstart their diet or to get away from eating unhealthy food and wanting a strict plan to cut that pattern off. Stay tuned for part two where I tell the tale of how the Special K challenge worked for me!
