Lighterlife Review
What You Should Know
LighterLife is a weight loss program from the United Kingdom that provides counseling, tracking, and packaged food. LighterLife is based on a very low calorie diet (VLCD) and provides just 500 calories a day- the bare minimum recommended by health experts to sustain humans.
According to the LighterLife website, the program is for people who have a BMI of 29 or more- just slightly less than that weight/height combination considered obese. The LighterLife program is based on the premise that overweight people are addicted to food the same way they can be addicted to drugs or alcohol and that they need to do two things to break the addiction. The first thing they need to do is to completely get away from food for a time. The second is to learn why the addiction started.
Ingredients
Not really applicable.
Product Features
The LighterLife Diet does not allow any food at all except for their Foodpacks. The Foodpacks come in the form of shakes, soups, and meal replacement bars. All of the LighterLife Foodpacks are nutritionally balanced to provide the proper amount of vitamins and minerals. Along with the VLCD, dieters get a weekly group counseling session that delves into the reasons each dieter is addicted to food.
There are some serious concerns by many weight loss experts about the LighterLife program. The first is that a VLCD can have serious consequences to a dieter’s health. VLCD’s cause rapid weight loss and breakdown of fat. Without drinking enough water to flush the fat deposits out, illness and toxicity may occur. Rapid fat loss also creates ketones, a by-product. Most low-carb diets, including this one, encourage the production of ketones (called ketosis) as a sign that fat burning is taking place. However, ketosis is controversial and many health professionals are concerned that ketones may damage the liver.
Another concern about the LighterLife diet in the weight loss industry is that it is “one size fits all”. The program is based on the assumption that all obese people have a food addiction. However, if weight has crept on slowly over a number of years, this may not be the case. The counseling would be minimally effective for these individuals and being taken completely away from the social aspects of food is considered by some to be unnecessary and isolating.
Advantages
- Rapid weight loss.
- Includes monitoring and counseling.
Disadvantages
- No “real” food is allowed for at least the first 100 days.
- Plan is very expensive for the Foodpacks and the counseling.
- Very low calorie diets can leave dieters dizzy and weak.
- Rapid weight loss can trigger ketosis.
Conclusion
The LighterLife program may have an appeal to those who are obese and have tried many other weight loss methods without success. However, most health professionals agree that learning to eat healthy and sensibly and exercising regularly are the best ways to lose weight and increase health. A weight loss aid with a metabolic booster like caffeine or green tea extract may also help.
