Optavia Diet : How It Works - Benefits - Risks
Optavia is actually a new version of an old type of diet, the Medifast diet created by a doctor in 1980, which includes packages of shakes, bars, and snacks. The diet plan has been regulated several times, and in 2017 it was called the Optavia diet.
What is the Optavia diet ?
The Optavia diet concept can be said to be a commercial diet because it involves the sale of food products in the form of shakes, bars, and various types of snacks.
The concept of this diet is also combined with good habits such as using the stairs instead of the elevator, drinking lots of water, and other good habits.
The initial phase of the Optavia diet is achieving optimal body weight which lasts up to 12 weeks, 6 months or more, depending on your initial weight and how much you want to lose weight.
In this phase, you are allowed to eat six times a day with small portions divided every 2-3 hours, so you don't feel hungry and blood sugar levels remain stable. Five of your six meals are processed and packaged foods.
Foods vary in the form of drinks, shakes, bars, cakes or other foods that are sold on this Optavia diet site. Each of these foods has about 100 calories and contains protein and probiotics.
Benefits of doing the Optavia diet
This diet is effective in losing weight because with a pattern of eating 6 times a day, and eating a diet with a low number of calories, then in a day people who run this diet only consume 800-1000 calories. This number of calories is much lower than the calorie needs of adults.
After reaching the ideal weight, in the Optavia diet concept you will enter a transition period. At this time, you are allowed to eat 3 servings of regular food (including fruit, milk, and wheat), but still consume 3 special menus of the Optavia diet.
After a while, you are only allowed to eat normal food in the amount and proportion that is regulated according to your daily needs.
Optavia diet pros and cons
Until now, the Optavia diet has various pros and cons. For those who support the Optavia diet, they think that this diet is effective in losing weight. Because this type of diet is an extreme limiting calorie intake in the body.
With this, automatically fat in the body will be converted into energy, so the body will experience weight loss. The next reason for the proponents of this diet is that it is easy to implement.
Foods that are arranged in this type of diet are already prepared and only need to be eaten or reheated, so you don't have to bother preparing your own food.
The next advantage, according to supporters of this type of diet, is the existence of community support to remind you of regular eating patterns and the existence of programs related to the Optavia diet on various social media that can help get information about this diet easily.
However, there are also some parties who oppose this type of diet. They think that the Optavia diet is unhealthy because it demands the intake of too many processed or packaged foods. Although these foods are said to be natural ingredients, they are actually processed foods.
In fact, to get a low-calorie food or snack, you can make it yourself with natural ingredients. The next cons is the taste of the foods sold in this diet program are not necessarily suitable for everyone.
Because some people feel bored eating these foods repeatedly. Then, there are also those who think that this type of diet is difficult to maintain in the long term.
This means that weight will indeed go down at the beginning of the diet because of low calorie intake, but in the long term it is difficult for someone to maintain a diet with foods created from the Optavia diet.
In the end, this type of diet is very likely to return to their old habits, even back to their original weight.
