I recently received correspondence in which the writer asked me if she could combine the Medifast and Weight Watchers diets. Specifically, she wanted to use the Medifast shakes, oatmeal, some of the soups, and pudding, while also making use of Weight Watcher’s Smart Ones line of frozen foods. He wanted to know if she would recommend this practice and if she thought it would work to help her lose some weight. I will tell you what I told him in the following article.

Combining The Weight Watcher Smart Ones foods with The Other Diet food options: I guess it wouldn’t be fair for me to tell the writer that I couldn’t prove this practice. After all, it is physically possible to do it. But, my opinion is that she shouldn’t be doing this in the long run. Of course, I am certainly not a doctor or an expert and I would certainly like you to seek the opinion of one. But, based on my research and my own experience, smart foods have too many calories, carbs, and sugars for you to successfully and quickly lose the weight you would have lost on the other diet. Keep in mind that my experience has been with this particular diet, so my opinion might be skewed based on my own positive results.

But I think Medifast works because it limits calories as well as sugars and carbohydrates. By doing this, you allow your body to go into ketosis where it can burn fat instead of carbs. From my research and experience, I know that the average person consumes too much sugar and carbohydrates. And when looking at nutrition facts for the smart, it seems that these foods do very little to address this problem. I’ll look at some specific foods on both diets to demonstrate this point below.

Comparison of nutrition, sugars and carbohydrates in Smart Ones with the similar content of Medifast Foods: To examine the content of both foods, I am going to look at concrete examples of both diets. First, I’ll look at some breakfast foods. Weight Watcher’s English muffin sandwich has 210 calories, 3 grams of sugars, and 27 grams of carbohydrates. Medifast Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal has 100 calories, 1 gram of sugar and 15 carbs. As you can see, one diet has about half as many bad things as the other.

Medifast asks you to eat a fresh, healthy meal that you prepare each day. This is known as “lean and green” food and most people eat it for dinner. It is for this reason that I will now compare foods for lunch. From the line of smart ones, I’ll look at the Santa Fe beans and rice. This clocks in at 310 calories, 6 grams of sugars, and 51 carbs. Now, let’s take a look at the Medifast chili. You’re looking at less than half the calories (at only 110). You’re looking at a lot less sugar, with just one gram. And, the carbohydrate content is 15 grams.

The bottom line: Obviously, this article is partially based on my own experiences and biases. But I also think that comparing foods side by side makes a pretty persuasive argument that one of these diets gives you a better chance of success than the other. It has less than half the calories, carbohydrates and sugars of the other. In my experience, you need all of these numbers to be favorable in order to lose the most weight in the fastest way possible.

There’s no point in interrupting any success you may be having by eating off-plan foods a couple of times a day. In this way, you are potentially derailing your progress and undoing all the progress you have made that day. Medifast is designed to work as a system. There’s nothing stopping someone from taking parts of two different diets, but why would you? In my opinion, the reason people go on a diet is to lose weight as quickly as possible. And in my opinion, the combination of these two diets does not have the potential to do this as well as following a diet as directed.