Starting with the “Fast5” is a mixed blessing with Nutrisystem. I can say that now that I’m a few weeks into the program and have finally started losing weight again. The jump-start — as I write about here: Nutrisystem Fast5 Was Fast and Easy — gets you moving down the scale quickly, but then it’s an adjustment afterwards to get back to your regular eating habits and metabolism. The result was that for the first few weeks after Fast5 I didn’t lose much of any weight at all.
Apparently this isn’t at all uncommon and just as there are the dreaded plateaus where you stick to your diet diligently but still don’t lose weight for a week or two, there’s also another adjustment that your body needs to make to go from just shedding that easy “water weight” to actually losing weight.
You can see the story in the graph of my weight, with the most recent weighing from this morning:
The individual dots are the story and you can see around May 15 I was just a smidge under 270, but the Fast5 program dropped me down to 263 fairly rapidly. Very encouraging. Since then it’s been slow going, but I’m hopeful that my metabolism has fired up again and now I can see a slow but steady decrease over the next month or two. Certainly my target weight is still a ways off…
Since most people probably haven’t tried a packaged diet program like Nutrisystem, I will say that it’s a bit daunting to get a big box of everything you’re supposed to eat for your meals dropped on your doorstep. You end up with things like this:
It’s all color coded to make life simple: orange is lunch, blue is breakfast, purple is dessert. In fact, the program includes two desserts a day, which is a lot more sweets than I usually eat, but I’m not complaining. 🙂
A typical day is probably less glamorous foodwise than a non-diet, but that’s true of any diet program, whether it’s Atkins, South Beach or, yes, Nutrisystem. Yesterday I had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, yogurt as a mid-morning snack while watching the French Open, a steak and cheese wrap for lunch, some pretzels mid-afternoon while at the local café, then dinner was a pizza and some salad. Evening snack was popcorn while catching up on Game of Thrones. Decent enough food and while none of it holds a candle to a home cooked meal, the convenience and simplicity of having it all pre-packaged is quite nice, actually.
Now to stick with it even as I go to parties, socialize, spend evenings at friend’s houses, etc. But so far, so good…
Disclaimer: I’m a Nutrisystem Nation Blogger and the company is supplying all the food, etc, without charge in return for me sharing my experiences with y’all. #NSNation