When It Comes to Weight Loss, Try a “Tried and True”: Jenny Craig

Every time we turn around, there’s another weight-loss program out there that promises to make you drop 10 pounds in 48 hours. Low-carb, no carb, low fat, no fat, no meat, and on and on and on. However, there is no real magic to losing weight. Simply, to get and keep weight off, you have to ingest a sensible amount of calories (neither too many nor too few) and a balanced amount of carbohydrates, fat and protein so that you can get and keep weight off sensibly.

It’s a simple fact that fad diets don’t work. They come and go, and they may even work for a while, but the simple fact is, no fad diet works for long because it’s unbalanced and unhealthy. You simply can’t sustain it. Therefore, a healthy weight loss/maintenance program is the only way to go.

If you want to, of course, you can certainly put together your own healthy weight loss program, perhaps hiring a nutritionist to advise you if you don’t have enough knowledge yourself to do so. But that means that you have to also learn a lot about calories, carbs, protein, “good” and “bad” foods, and balanced meals. A lot of us have neither the inclination nor the time to invest in this type of knowledge, and so we simply grab the first thing we see, junk food or fast food. And of course, this means that we stay overweight.

Jenny Craig can help you fix that. No “new kid on the block,” in fact, Jenny Craig has been around for 25 years. The program works because it gives you a carefully constructed meal plan that you fresh fruits and vegetables and low-fat dairy to. The meals are prepackaged, so there’s no thought given to it, and it appeals to the “quick grabbers” in all of us. There’s no thinking with this meal plan. You simply grab your meals and go. In fact, that element is one of the biggest reasons Jenny Craig is so successful. It gives dieters the convenience they want, but it does so with healthy meals are carefully constructed and prepackaged so that dieters don’t have to think about what they’re eating.

Now, of course, that’s a drawback, too, because eventually, even the laziest of dieters are going to have to learn what “good nutrition” means. And that means, they’ll have to learn how to cook with nutritious foods and ingredients, and learn proper portion sizes. But the good thing about Jenny Craig is that this “grab and go” focus on prepackaged meals is relatively short term. While the meals themselves give dieters a jump-start on their weight-loss program, and also serve as models to what healthy meal contents and portion sizes look like, dieters are also meeting with counselors to learn how to plan and cook their own healthy meals and dish out their own healthy portion sizes.

And of course, everything has disadvantages. Jenny Craig is no exception. The meals are pretty expensive, and you’ll pay between $10 and $15 a day for them, plus additional expenses for the dairy and fresh fruits and vegetables you purchase on your own. The other thing is, this diet, too, is short-lived. It’s not meant to be a permanent solution, and instead is simply meant to jump-start you on weight loss while you learn how to manage portion sizes and do your own cooking at the same time.

And even though $10-$15 a day (plus fruit, vegetables and dairy) sounds expensive, it’s really not. Think about that for a minute. How much do you spend on food now? If it’s in the ballpark of $600 a month, Jenny Craig plan is not going to cost you any more. (And even if it does, what you’ll save over the long term, including health care expenses and the rescuing of your own health, it’s probably certainly worth whatever extra you spend.)

The bottom line? As with most weight-loss programs, Jenny Craig is meant to be a temporary tool by which you learn to construct and manage your own dietary needs so that you get “just enough” of the right kinds of calories to maintain a healthy weight without overdoing it, without depriving yourself, and without yo-yoing back and forth from obesity to “normal” weight. It’s a good solid program with 25 years of experience behind it, and while not perfect, it certainly can be a good start to getting to your own goal weight. It’s up to you to decide.

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