Which Meal Replacements are Best
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By Joel greene
Yesterday we put meal replacements in their proper place. They are fantastic tools to help you lose weight.
The advantage liquid meal replacements have in terms of weight loss over all other meal driven tools is their exacting ratio’s of protein, fat and carbs to total calories . They simply beat all comers hands down on that front.
They also don’t truly replace a meal.
In fact, most meal replacements are nutritional junk, full of things like maltodextrin, hydrogenated oils, canola oil, guar gum, no enzymes, no greens, no fiber.
Our goal here is to give you the right tools, and the right way to use those tools.
In this series, we give you an honest look at how to use meal replacements to take advantage of their strengths while mitigating their weaknesses. If you follow what is in this series you will be well equipped to drop some body fat quickly and painlessly.
Today we look at which meal replacements are best. Before you read this, if you haven’t familiarized yourself with the LookCut longevity based Peak Shape and Average Shape concepts, you may wish to review that.
Let’s get to the fun stuff. So what are the best meal replacements? It would not be fair to give some kind of subjective ranking without giving you the criteria.
We emphasize a longevity based approach here at LookCut. As it pertains to food, this means that we want to eat things that are as close to nature as possible. This means eating foods that are fresh, whole, and have intact nutrients like enzymes, phytonutrients, fiber and are minimally processed.
As I mentioned, the problem with meal replacements is that they don’t actually replace a true meal. Thus, the primary criteria for our ranking here is how to gauge the following meal replacements by how closely they approximate REAL FOOD. Here is the list.
THE BEST MEAL REPLACEMENTS
First: The Udo’s Wholesome Fast Food, Daily Greens Complete, protein combo.
The best meal replacement available isn’t a single product. We don’t even sell The Udo’s component, nor should you buy it online (It needs to stay refrigerated. Your best bet is to try your local health food store for the Udo’s.)
If you want the single most powerful combination of nutrients that best approach the spectrum of properties in real food, this combination packs an unbelievable amount of LIFE giving nutrition from REAL WHOLE FOODS into about 260 calories.
The Udo’s Fast Food gives you all the EFA’s and grains and fiber you need, along with enzymes and intact probiotics, combined with Daily Greens Complete with over 50 super foods and an unheard of 9,600 ORAC value. This is simple the rolls Royce of meal replacements. Personally, I do a scoop of Lean Complex Vanilla, 2 scoops of Daily Greens Complete and 2 tablespoons of Udo’s fast food about 2 to 3 nights per week as my last meal of the day. The flavor is actually really good when combined with the vanilla lean complex.
This combination is tops for nutrition content, but lags behind in terms of time to prepare. You’re not dealing with a single packet, but 3 different products.
COMBINE -
- 2 tablespoons Udo's wholesome fast food: This stuff is a terrific combo of whole grains and essential fats. From this you get a great blend of healthy carbs, real fiber and udo’s famous essential fats.
- 2 scoops of a good greens product: I recommend our own Daily Greens Complete. If there was something else that did better than 52 super foods and 9600 ORAC value I would be using it. There isn’t. I use Daily Greens Complete three times a day myself. Taste is terrific. Not so with a lot of other greens products.
- 1 scoop of a good blended protein: Here you want a good time release protein, ideally a good blend of whey concentrate, isolate, and micellular caseins. Our Lean Complex is about as good as it gets in this department, but if you don’t use ours, any good blended protein will do.
Second: Bio Complete – Global Formulas
There is a reason we carry this stuff in our store. It’s simply the single best packetized meal replacement you can buy. No, it’s not within 100 miles of the Udo’s/Daily Greens/Protein combo, but you have to do a bit of legwork to pull that combo together.
Bio Complete is the first meal replacement to take an honest stab at putting greens into a packetized meal replacement. It even mixes green! This is really a terrific product, considering most meal replacements are nutritional garbage. In addition to the greens, you get a whopping 10 grams of fiber from mostly fructooligosaccharides (nothing mega special, but much better than maltodexttrin) and some whole grains. Also included are some EFA’s and to top it off, they throw in their magnesium bonded glutamine and amino’s. I know a lot about meal replacements and this one really does stand above most of the nutritional packetized junk that’s out there. Taste is basically identical to Met-Rx.
Third: Lean Body Breakfast – Labrada Nutrition
There are a lot of pluses going on with this product; carbs from whole grains, 7 grams of fiber, beta glucans, even an attempt at pre-biotics (sorry, their mostly dead) and EFA’s. (no omega 3’s, no points).
Minuses are the usual suspects, no greens, no enzymes, no phytonutrients. Of particular interest is the purposeful inclusion of Glutamic Acid. Glutamic Acid is the end product of MSG. It’s what’s called an excito-toxin. Not something you want more of in your diet.
Still, this is a decent product overall. It’s at the top of the bodybuilder heap of products for sure. We don’t sell it here but you can find it readily online.
There you have the 3 best options for a meal replacement. Tomorrow we will look at the limitations of meal replacements. This is important because you can’t use them properly and to utmost effectiveness until you understand their limitations.
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