Need a Weight Loss Program? How about Jenny Craig?
Weight-loss programs abound these days, with “newer and better” jumping on board every day, touting “no carbs,” “low carbs,” liquid diets, “the Master Cleanse,” and on and on and on. It’s enough to make your head spin, isn’t it? But in fact, the tried and true wisdom of any weight-loss program is that you have to have a balanced amount of calories with enough “good” fats and carbohydrates, and enough protein, to help you lose weight and then maintain the weight once you’ve lost it.
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.
It’s probably true you can construct your own healthy weight loss program (perhaps with the help of a nutritionist) so that you can lose weight and keep it off, comfortably, and without starving. The problem is, a lot of us have neither the time nor the inclination to do this, and so go back to munching junk food “quick grab” lunches, meaning that we also 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.
Of course, this “grab and go” convenience can be a disadvantage, too, because I can hear you thinking, “Well, overweight and obese people get that way because they don’t learn how to cook properly and learn proper portion sizes, not just because they don’t learn how to eat properly.” But the Jenny Craig weight-loss program addresses that, too, because the first part of the program (the “grab and go” part of the program) is relatively short-lived. The meals themselves are meant to serve as models to what healthy portion sizes and meal contents look like. During that same time, dieters also meet with counselors, with the ultimate goal of planning and cooking their own healthy meals with 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.
That said, the expense probably isn’t that much more per day than a rabid fast food habit might be, for example, and it’s certainly well worth the expense for the short term. And the cost savings over the long term (such as health care expenses) for simply getting your weight under control are probably also very worth the money you’re spending on the program.
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.
