One of the primary questions of anyone who is just starting to diet with Medifast is usually, “what are the allowable foods on Medifast?” They do a pretty good job of explaining their program and what’s allowed in the materials you get with your first order, but if you would like to know what to expect before you place an order with them, here is a good overview of what kind of foods are allowed on the diet.
The Medifast product are the primary foods that you’ll be eating each day. So you don’t need to put a lot of thought into those. Just pick your five Medifast meals and you are all set. The question of what’s allowed comes up when it is time to think about your lean and green meal. Since you prepare this yourself at home, you’ll need to do some grocery shopping. Naturally you want to know what’s on the shopping list.
As the name of the meal, lean and green, hints, you’ll be picking up lean protein and lots of vegetables. So let’s take a look at each side of the plate.
Lean Protein
The lean part of your meal consists of lean protein. You have both meat and vegetarian options here. Portion sizes depend on the fat content of your selected protein. So if you choose certain types of fish, you can have 7 ounces, but beef or pork choices will limit you to 5 ounces. Poultry falls right in the middle at 6 ounces.
For vegetarian options, the choices range from 14 egg whites or 3 whole eggs, with the whole eggs clearly containing more fat. Other vegetarian options include items like Boca Burgers, Morningstar Farms patties and Tofu.
The Green Portion
The green side of your plate is made up of leafy green vegetables and other colorful veggies. Eliminated are foods like potatoes, corn, carrots and other high carbohydrate vegetables. Serving sizes, for your greens, are determined by carbohydrate level.
So, for example, you can have a 1 cup serving of of nearly all leafy greens such as lettuce or spinach, but only a 1/2 cup serving of cauliflower or asparagus. Your entire green serving is three servings, keeping the portion restrictions in mind. So you could have three cups of leafy greens, or one cup of leafy greens and a 1/2 cup of portabella mushrooms and a 1/2 cup of peppers to make a nice, colorful salad.
Additional Fats
Finally, Medifast also adds some additional fats to your daily diet and the amount depends on how much fat is in the protein choices that you made. Fats are added because some vitamins and minerals are fat-soluble only, so fats are an important part of a healthy diet. For your fat serving, you get to choose from items such as black olives, low carb salad dressing, olive oil, canola oil and even trans-fat free margarine.
As you can see the main items that are eliminated from the Medifast diet are white flour and other high carbohydrate foods like rice and potatoes, etc. But overall you have quite a variety of allowable foods on Medifast and so you should be able to maintain some variety in your lean and green meals without feeling deprived.
Before you place your first order, be sure to check out my Medifast review, which covers all of their different products.I also have some tips for quick & easy lean and green meals: http://dietinspector.com/2008/medifast-lean-green-menu-ideas/
