It’s easy for Hollywood starlets to stay slim and svelte. After all, their job is to look gorgeous in films, on the cover of magazines, albums and on the red carpet. They have personal trainers and dieticians who dictate their exercise regime and plan a meticulous, delicious menu full of healthy food guaranteed to keep them thin.
The way the rest of the world keeps track of food consumption is either calorie counting, carb counting, point counting and other calculator cartwheels; or eschewing all yummy food in favour of only fruits, veg, lean protein and brown carbohydrates. Death by mathematics or boredom seem to be the only options.
But now there’s a way that Joe and Jane Average can mimic the lives of the world’s slimmest: Diet Chef, a service that delivers home-cooked healthy meals straight to the doorstep.
Imagine having a personal chef who measures out portions, counts calories, cooks the meals and delivers straight to the front door. With Diet Chef, for only £5.43 per day, dieters can have this personalised service.
How Does Diet Chef Work?
Diet Chef has developed a menu full of low-calorie food, and put it into easy, on-the-go packages, divided into the following categories:
- breakfast
- lunch
- dinner
- snacks
Once customers sign up to the plan, a hamper is delivered to their door every week. With the plan, dieters choose which foods they want to eat from a chef-prepared, pre-portioned menu. They then choose one breakfast, one lunch, one dinner and two snacks to eat for each day. No other food may be consumed on the diet, with the exception of small portions of fresh fruit and vegetables.
How to Get Started on Diet Chef
Customers go to the Diet Chef website, and choose a plan based around a few options: 1200 calories per day for most people, or 1500 calories per day for very active people or those with a good deal of weight to lose. Then a choice is offered to pay monthly or weekly. The monthly option is best for those with more than a stone (14lbs) to lose, whereas the weekly option is best for those with less than a stone to lose.
From there, customers are directed to the Menu, where they choose from an array of delicious, balanced and healthy meals. Some popular dinner favourites include Chicken Fricassee, Chicken Tikka Masala, and Paella. For breakfast, options include varying types of granola and porridge in yummy flavours such as Chocolate, and Treacle & Pecan. Lunch options are either sweet flavoured shakes or soups such as Thai Chicken and Chorizo & Bean. Snacks come in the form of oat crackers or fruit snack bars.
The Nitty Gritty - Who Does it Work For?
In practice, Diet Chef is great for very busy people, especially those who work. All the meals come in sealed, secure packs that can easily go into a handbag or briefcase.
Some of the difficulties with the diet include:
- Diet Chef makes no provision for eating out (similarly to Cambridge or LighterLife Diets). If one eats out, the food one has bought for the day isn’t eaten, which could result in leftover packages of diet food after the goal weight is achieved.
- For lunch, the options are all liquid -- shakes or soups. For anyone on the go, finding a bowl or microwave for the soup has proven to be a tough challenge. The other lunch option is a shake, which is hard for those who want solid food at each mealtime.
- Eating food that no one else in the house is eating -- specifically difficult for mums/dads who have to cook for a family, then get their meal out of a pouch.
- The money side of things -- in addition to budgeting for eating out and buying food for a family, Diet Chef will cost between £28-48 additional per week. This isn’t so bad if a dieter doesn’t have family to worry about, or eschews going out in favour of the Diet Chef purchase.
However, there are obvious ways around these difficulties, such as rarely eating out, and only ordering a salad when doing so (calorie counting could be hard otherwise); and eating a snack bar at lunch and saving the soup/shake for a snack.
All in all, if someone wants the worry taken out of dieting, Diet Chef is a great way to go. If the diet is stuck to, and no additional food save fruits and vegetables are consumed, weight loss is guaranteed on only 1200-1500 calories per day. Any difficulties in the diet seem to pertain more to those who are cash-strapped or have a large family to budget food for.
More information can be found on the Diet Chef website.
Sources: www.dietchef.co.uk, 21/01/10
Scottish Daily Record, www.dailyrecord.co.uk, 22/01/10
Sarah Viollet - Sarah is an American from Los Angeles permanently settled in the UK. She really appreciates a good joke about her countrymen. In summer ...
