The meal replacement brands all make big promises to helping you to lose weight quickly as long as you buy their product and do little else. One product that's dominating the radio adverts lately promises to guys to help them lose weight without you losing all the beers! What a joke! Alcohol gives you 7 calories per gram, compared to carbohydrates only giving you 4 calories per gram. With carbs being a major contributor to weight gain and other adverse health conditions, alcohol is far worse.
If you want to lose weight and be healthier, you need to acknowledge what you may have been doing in the past was wrong and take responsibility for that and make some major changes to your food choices and lifestyle. The marketing of these meal replacement products is that you can get healthier if you made SOME changes, but it's like you can still keep on smoking...
And then we look at the ingredients of these meal replacement products. They are scary. One meal replacement product for weight loss commonly advertised on the TV (Optifast) has two forms of sugar as the second and third highest ingredients, and aspartame, a cancer-causing artificial sweetener, in it as well. I can't see how this works to help with weight loss as sugar is one of the major causes of obesity and weight gain.
Another product is "the man shake" which contains a lot of carbohydrates, and thus contributes to weight gain. It also contains sucralose, an artificial sweetener (also known as "splenda") which has also been shown to cause cancer, and many other negative health effects including an increasing risk of diabetes, digestive conditions and more.
In addition, their suggested menu plan on their website is appalling, with so much food, including having morning tea, afternoon tea and dessert every day (except one day in a fortnight)! Eating a better meal plan and some regular movement or exercise will shift the extra weight far better than this meal replacement program ever will. And you DO have to lose some of the alcohol too.
Weight gain has many factors (of which I have written about here before) - many more than just what you eat or how little exercise you do. Hence to lose weight, you have the address all of the known or possible causes. These meal replacement programs do not fix any of these causes, and as such, they will not work for weight loss in the majority of people. Better would be to get a personalised plan from a Nutritionist and Naturopath that first identifies YOUR causes and treats your causes.
If weight gain is an issue for you, I'd like to help you with real, scientifically proven methods, that are still healthy and actually work! And without buying expensive artificial food full of unhealthy junk.