Meal replacement shakes are also commonly marketed as weight loss products, and they can be a great tool for weight management in a variety of scenarios. If there’s a very low calorie count, it’s intuitive to believe that this would make a better weight loss product, but it’s actually the inverse that’s correct.
Let’s recall a question we posed early, what if you replaced your regular 500 calorie lunch with a 200 calorie meal replacement shake? Now for weight loss, this sounds great, as you’re setting yourself up well for a calorie deficit, but are you really? It might not be much of a challenge on the first day, a couple of hunger pangs but you’ll make it to dinner and feel fine, but you’re setting yourself up for failure in the long run as you’re much more likely to fall into bad habits for snacking and over-portioning in order to make up this hunger.
On the flipside, if you replaced your dinner with Rootana, a meal replacement shake with 400 calories that is packed to the brim with fiber and complex carbohydrates, both of which help you stay fuller for longer, you’d be a lot less likely to fall into such habits. Sure you might lose weight faster the first way, but it’s not the healthy way to go about it.