The last few posts have placed the burden of understanding your calorie needs on you. That can seem daunting. It can also seem restrictive. Mostly it can seem like a huge time burden. In this post, we will revisit many diet aides, pills, and programs. By the end of the post, we hope you will understand why we chose to avoid them. We also hope you will be better informed of where they can help and the costs associated with them.
Weight Loss is a Lucrative Industry
The weight loss industry was worth roughly $90 billion in 2023 according to Market Research. This is just the drugs, programs, and pills. The fitness industry adds another roughly $22.4 billion to that according to Health & Fitness. The sports nutrition market was worth about $44 billion in 2023 based on data from Allied Market Research. Dietary supplements are another huge industry weighing in at $183 billion based on research by Garage Gym Review.
Why is this industry making so much money? Everyone knows meeting your calorie and nutrition intake needs for your goals is not easy. All of us would love it if someone had a pill for that, or a program, or a supplement that made it so much easier right? If someone can give you something simple, for a fee, to help you meet your goals, why wouldn’t we? Well, we chose not to due to sustainability.
Some Things are Legit and Necessary
Let’s also qualify some things. There are legitimate medical drugs and supplements for weight loss/gain. These come from medical and healthcare professionals. For someone who has specific medical needs, some things can be prescribed. There are also nutritional substitutes recommended by your care providers when you are sick. In my case, it was to add mass after a month-long bout of mono left me 20 lbs lighter than I should have been.
In these cases, the items prescribed or recommended don’t always come without a cost or risk. Some are meant to be used for a limited time. The insurance you have may not cover them which leaves you paying for them out of pocket. You may have adverse reactions to them. Having had reactions with medications I can say first hand it wasn’t a joy ride I wanted to take again unless my doctor told me to.
Some Things are Gray Areas
In our case, we wanted to be ahead of needing such drastic measures. We also looked into some of the more natural supplemental management tools such as Apple Cider Vinegar. With no real scientific evidence to back up the claims, we didn’t trust it (or any of them). It felt like we were being sold snake oil in the Old West. Again, it was another thing that just didn’t seem sustainable to use. The whole area of these types of supplements is worthy of an entire blog post at another time.
We know that programs and diets do work for some people. We began to question the long-term sustainability of the programs and diets. Programs and diets that create a permanent behavior change can create sustainable lifestyles. This was our takeaway from the initial research we did for ourselves. All of them seemed to point directly back to what we were already learning. At their core, they were a series of goals to meet using controlled portion sizes and nutritional makeup.
Let’s Talk About Two Examples
The Basic: Here’s Your Program Plan
Let’s talk about an example. Weight Watchers has been around for a long time. It has changed and adapted and grown. The medical community supports it. Their big selling point is you can eat any food you like. They have apps, plans, nutritionists, and other professionals on their payroll to help you. If it fits your points based on your profile, you can make and eat it.
Will it help you? The answer is maybe. For us, we asked the question of whether it was sustainable long term. The answer for us was only if we were able to learn from it. We decided we didn’t want to invest our time or money in something we could learn ourselves.
For some, the idea of community, gamifying your weight goals, nutritional analysis, and other perks may help. A lot of what they offer is psychological support and mechanisms to keep you on track. At the time of writing this that was $23 a month. Cheap by most standards but couldn’t we do that ourselves?
A Bit More: We’re Your Personal Chef
We also looked at meal replacement programs like Jenny Craig. They have also been around for a long time. For a fee, you create a menu of items from their program, and they ship it to you. It would cut down our grocery bills and make life a lot easier to plan food and nutrition-wise. We travel so our menu had to be portable. The price tag was also around $150 a week per person at the time of writing this. For two people, for 52 weeks, that is $15,600 a year.
Not Good, Not Bad, Not Sustainable
We realized that these types of diets, programs, and pills weren’t sustainable for us. Are you going to spend that money or stick to a menu someone else creates for the rest of your life to keep your goals? We weren’t.
It isn’t that Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, or any type of plan is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The issue is that if you aren’t learning how it manages your weight goals, it won’t become part of your habits and lifestyle. That means the gains we would make were tied to something we couldn’t sustain.
For us, this is why we invested in understanding these things the hard way. With all the apps, data, and information out there, we could do it ourselves. By taking the time to invest in ourselves we learned how to have healthier habits. More importantly, we learned how to handle situations the programs didn’t cover like when we were on vacation or traveling.
We have talked about why many aspects of weight management such as diets, supplements, and pills can work in the short term but not the long. At the end of this post hopefully, you start to realize how an entire industry is trying to sell you many things you can do yourself. Not only can you do them yourself, you can change your life habits in the process. The win here is that you also don’t need to spend money to do it.