What alternatives are there to diet with diet shakes?
In principle, there are countless alternatives to this diet form.The principle of any serious diet is based on the fact that the calories consumed during the day are less than the calorie consumption. This deficit does not have to be reached every day, but can be calculated for example also on the week. Even if at present the Low-Carb trend experiences a true high, one can reach a calorie deficit also with an adequate nutrition and must do thereby neither on fats, nor on coal hydrates or proteins do without.
The idea behind a low carb diet is that you don’t give your body carbohydrates, so the body attacks other forms of energy storage – preferably body fat – to provide energy. Evolutionary, however, we humans are driven to first metabolize our muscle tissue, i.e. proteins, before attacking body fat. To counteract this effect, muscles must be used to signal the body that it must not break them down because they are still needed.
Unfortunately, simple activities such as walking, etc. are not enough for this. The muscles have to be used heavily to prevent their degradation. In the end, however, every person has to find out which type of diet suits him/her best and which one is the easiest to stick to.
Medical evaluation of the diet
On the packaging of these diet shakes, there is usually a sentence that indicates that the diet shake is not a substitute for a balanced diet. In principle, from a medical point of view, a lot has already been said about this. There is no need for such a diet shake and often the calorie reductions are set far too high.
Almased, for example, recommends to replace two meals with shakes, whereby each shake only provides about 250kcal, provided that it is prepared according to the recommendation. In most cases this corresponds to a drastic calorie reduction of more than 500kcal per day, which is not advisable from a medical point of view. The calorie consumption should be reduced slowly.
In addition, from a medical point of view, sport is an essential part of any successful diet. It ensures that things like blood lipid values improve much faster than by reducing calories alone. In addition, it is always crucial for the physician how long patients can maintain a health-promoting behavior. As a rule, balanced cooking with wholesome products is much more likely to lead people to deal with issues such as obesity or atherosclerosis than simply replacing meals with shakes without realizing the difference between wholesome and “bad” food.
