Just been checking out the website for a certain company I’d seen advertised on TV who offer calories controlled meals, delivered to your door, and wanted to see what their offering was and how the plan was put together. [clue: you get to eat tiny packets of crisps while watching TV 😉 ]
£61.25 a week (£8.75/day) to have your 3 meals / day delivered, all carefully restricted to 1,200kcal per day, didn’t sound too bad. Ok, I can do better (I spend less than that on 2 people for a week eating mostly Paleo) but for people desperate to lose weight and too busy to do it for themselves, well it saves a trip to Tesco or the local sarnie bar at lunchtime.
Jesus Christ, it’s shit!
- Breakfast = small portion flavoured granola, flavoured porridge or an oat cookie.
- Lunch = a small soup, pasta salad or a milkshake (?)
- Snacks = oat cookies
- Dinners = a little better; curries and familiar pasta dishes.
So, basically, you starve all day just eating tiny portions of sugar laden food to keep you conscious and right before bedtime you eat a plate of curry and rice. No veg tho – you have to add your own “to meet government guidelines”. Erm, I thought the point of this was to take away the eater’s input – after all, they can’t be trusted to select their own food 😉 A whole year with only the extra fresh fruit and veg being what you remember to add yourself (chips count as veg, right?) you might be thinner at the end of the year but you’d look like the undead!
By my rough calcs (and not counting delivery) that’s about £5 worth of food a day, based on high-end, organic granola, Covent Garden soups, Waitrose ready low-cal dinner, and posh ‘healthy’ biscuits for snacks. May I see your licence, to print money, Sir?
If I ate that for a week my skin would turn to crap and I’d be in a perma-fugg. Ok, I’m not looking to lose a stone so this obviously isn’t designed for me, but 1,200kcal of processed food for months on end? How can you learn to make good choices when someone else is making those decisions for you?
There’s the obvious point, I suppose. Educating people to feed themselves ‘right’ does not generate revenue for these companies. Some of the responsibility has to lie with the people who pay for it, expecting a quick fix without effort on their part, but can you blame them when the message they’re given is that low-calorie is good and it’s all very complicated so let us do the “hard work” for you?
Rant over 🙂
