I sometimes hear from people who ask me if Medifast is really a high protein diet like others in this category. They often wonder how a prepackaged diet can compete with do it yourself diets that are known specifically for their high amounts or protein. I recently heard from someone who said: “Is Medifast really considered a high protein diet? I know it gets you into ketosis, but how much protein are you really getting?” I will answer these question as specifically as I can in the following article.
What Really Constitutes A High Protein Diet: I think it’s fair to say that most of these types of diets advocate getting 30 percent of your calories from protein. Another calculation that is often used to determine how much protein you need is multiplying your weight by .37. So, with this method, if you weighed 150 pounds, you would need (according to these calculations) 55 grams of protein per day.
Looking At The Amount Of Protein In A Day’s Worth Of Medifast: In order to calculate the amount of protein that you would be taking in on this diet each day, I’ll look at a sample menu and tally the protein content from each item. The number behind each menu item I’m about to list with tell you it’s protein content. Here we go. Here are the meals in order: breakfast: southwest style eggs (14); mid morning snack: dutch chocolate shake (11); lunch: chili (14); afternoon snack: peanut butter soft serve ice cream (11); lean and green meal for dinner (the exact menu is up to you;) nightly snack: chili nacho cheese puffs (11). So, we’re already at 61 grams of protein and we have not even calculated in our lean and green meal which should ideally consist of 3 – 5 ounces of lean protein.
Since protein consists of 4 calories per gram, we are looking at 244 grams of protein (before our lean and green meal) in a diet that consists of around 1200 calories per day. In order to reach that 30 percent of desirable protein, we would need 156 calories of protein for your lean and green meal which is about 30 grams. Since a 3.5 ounce chicken breast contains 30 grams of protein, that means you are right on track. And that’s not even counting the protein that might be contained in the 3 servings of veggies you want to have in your lean and green because beans in particular contain generous amounts.
So according to the above calculations, I hope that I’ve shown you that yes, in my opinion Medifast is in line with a high protein diet.
By: Lindsey Price
