Here's Everything That's Wrong With Fat Loss Meal Replacement Shakes

You may have seen a lot of supposed weight loss experts, who keep posting statements on the lines of 'lose weight how, ask me now!' across the internet. They claim that you will lose weight without exercising or even watching the diet. No efforts weight loss guaranteed and more ridiculous claims. 

Now, these people are the worst representatives of fitness and are doing a disservice to the industry by harming people. I, personally, find them intolerable and their claims, outright ridiculous and misleading.  The reason I detest them is them selling unwanted or rather harmful things to gullible people in the name of weight loss aids.

The Intolerably Fake Business Of Meal Replacement

Most of these aids are meal replacement shakes and are sold on the premise of you buying them, using a shit ton of them, and then you selling the same stuff to others.  A famous company that we can't name here basically does exactly this. The legend goes that you take one serving of this shake in some skimmed milk in place of your meals along with the pills, and you will start losing weight. Sounds easy, right?

So What's In These Shakes?

When you look at these shakes, they contain around 120 to 130 kcals per shake when taken with skimmed milk. Take this say three to four times a day and you are consuming around 500 to 600 calories for the ENTIRE day.  

And if you really want to compare how many calories you actually eat per meal in terms of other food options, it may be one medium sized banana along with 3 to 4 almonds. Yup, that's about it!  That is no way sufficient food and you definitely cannot live on such small portions for long. 

And if you just ate that much food for the day, say 3 to 4 bananas and 10 to 12 almonds, you will end up losing weight either way, because you simply cut out major calories.

The problems that I have with these shakes are:

1. They Are Not Fixing The Real Issue

You are overweight because you have no control over your food intake or you do not exercise or a combination of the two. By having this quick fix at disposal, you are going to lose some weight, fall back to your old habits and gain back all the weight.

What did it really fix? Absolutely nothing!

2. Ignorance

Your nutrition habits are already terrible and re-educating yourself and aligning your actions and forming better habits should be your goal. But you'd rather choose to ignore that and run for a new solution every time you see it. Along with that, you will still consider creatine a steroid.

3. The 'Magic Pill' mentality

For you, it will be one of the many such ditches you'd dip into, to lose some weight magically. It will be this shake for some, then a new fat burner on the market, then the new fad diet, then the new organic eating lifestyle.

You would rather burn down your health and burn your pockets over getting the basics correct and fixing the problems once and for all.

Author bio:

Pratik Thakkar is an online fitness coach who is regarded as someone who will make it easy for you to understand the process by putting things in the right context and providing science-based recommendations. In his free time, Pratik likes to read about psychology or play on his PlayStation. He can be reached at thepratikthakkar@gmail.com for your fitness-related queries and coaching inquiries.