Nutrisystem Review – Is It Right For You?

Nutrisystem is a new diet that helps you lose weight by delivering meals directly to your home. Is Nutrisystem the diet plan that will work for you? Let’s find out today in our review.

What is Nutrisystem?

Nutrisystem is a diet system founded in 1972 by Harold Katz. Today, the diet system has grown into one of the most recognized names in the weight loss industry. The company claims it has helped millions of people lose weight over the years.

The secret to Nutrisystem’s success is its portion-controlled meals: it takes the guesswork out of dieting, allowing for easier weight loss with minimal planning required on your part.

Nutrisystem delivers meals to your house every week. The company takes care of the majority of grocery shopping, cooking, and portioning for you. All meals and snacks delivered through the company are calorie-controlled and pre-prepared. All you need to do is heat and enjoy, adding a few grocery store items along the way.

Up until 2009, Nutrisystem only sold pantry-ready foods. Starting in 2009, the company started delivering frozen meals across the nation. Today, the two lineups of products combined deliver more than 150 menu items.

Nutrisystem My Way

Starting in 2014, Nutrisystem unveiled a system called My Way, which is customized to each individual’s metabolism. When you sign up for Nutrisystem, you’re automatically enrolled in this customized program. The system calculates your metabolic rate by taking into account factors like age, sex, weight, and level of physical activity. That’s a big improvement from the previous system, which just assigned two metabolic rates whether you were a man or a woman.

Nutrisystem Turbo10

In January 2016, Nutrisystem expanded its product lineup even further by introducing Turbo10. This program claims to be a clinically-tested way to lose weight. Nutrisystem Turbo10 specifically promises to help you lose 10 pounds of weight while reducing 5 inches from your waist, hips, thighs, chest, and arms in just the first month of the diet.

As evidence for these weight loss results, Nutrisystem cites a clinical study where participants lost 3 times more weight, 3 times more total body inches, and 3 times more body fat than a control group following their own weight loss plan.

How Does Nutrisystem Work?

Nutrisystem has a variety of plans to meet different nutritional needs, price points, and levels of convenience. You can also choose different meals based on whether you’re a man, woman, teen, diabetic, or vegetarian.

After signing up for Nutrisystem, you’ll receive 28 days’ worth of food. That food arrives in pantry-ready or frozen containers. You heat these containers before eating, but they’re otherwise ready to eat.

In addition to the Nutrisystem meals, you’ll need to certain foods at the grocery store – like fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, whole grain bread, fish, and others.

All Nutrisystem members also receive access to something called the Mindset Makeover behavioral guide, which is a 13 week online plan that promises to help you better understand your relationship with food. Basically, it’s a way to restructure your thinking to help make it easier to follow diets. The Mindset Makeover program also includes free optional counseling from trained Nutrisystem weight loss coaches as well as registered dieticians and certified diabetes educators.

Nutrisystem Meals

As mentioned above, there are over 150 different meals currently available in the Nutrisystem lineup. Those 150 meals and snack options include a variety of frozen foods as well as pantry-ready foods.

These foods are designed to cover every meal of the day – including dessert. Expect to see muffins, roasted vegetable pizza, stuffed shells, macaroni and cheese, chicken noodle soup, chicken parmesan, and tacos as some of your main meals.

Meanwhile, snacks include granola bars and pretzels. For dessert, you’ll find oatmeal raisin cookies, chocolate, ice cream, and whoopee pies.

You’ll need to add some of your own fresh fruits and vegetables to your Nutrisystem lineup. Some of the items are delivered ready to eat, while others require heating.

Here’s what one average day on the Nutrisystem diet might look like:

-Breakfast: Granola cereal or a honey wheat bagel

-Snack: Hummus or an orange

-Lunch: Red beans and rice or chicken tacos

-Dinner: Meatloaf with mashed potatoes or sweet and sour chicken

-Dessert: Red velvet whoopee pies or walnut chocolate chip cookies

Nutrient Value of Nutrisystem Meals

Overall, the foods are designed to have a low glycemic index while containing a balanced blend of quality carbs (50%), good fats (25%) and protein (25%). Meals are also designed to be low in sodium and trans fats. By achieving these macro nutrient values, Nutrisystem promises to help customers manage their blood sugar while maintaining a feeling of fullness or satiety between meals.

Don’t expect to eat a lot when following Nutrisystem: the men’s program contains about 1500 calories per day while the woman’s program contains about 1200. Those numbers will go up or down slightly according to your current weight, age, and activity level.

Every day, you eat three Nutrisystem meals and two Nutrisystem snacks along with six servings of fresh fruits and vegetables (Nutrisystem will recommend which fruits and vegetables to add to your daily diet). A typical day on the Nutrisystem diet includes breakfast, lunch, dinner, one snack, and one dessert.

You can choose which meals to eat every day, or you can get Nutrisystem to automatically choose your meals based on customer favorites.

Nutrisystem also likes to emphasize its natural food sources: in 2016, Nutrisystem announced that more than 50% of its menu items contained no artificial colors, flavors, or sweeteners (of course, viewed from another angle, approximately 50% of the company’s menu items do contain artificial flavors, sweeteners, and colors).

Nutrisystem also advertises that whole grains play a significant part of the diet, and that the grains meet USDA guidelines for saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbs, fiber, and protein.

Nutrisystem and Exercise

You can speed up your weight loss goals by following Nutrisystem’s exercise recommendations. Nutrisystem encourages its members to get 150 minutes of moderate exercise every week. For most members, that works out to about 30 minutes of exercise, 5 days a week.

Many users like the “My Daily 3” program, which splits up your daily 30 minutes of exercise into 3 x 10 minute sessions – so even if you have a busy schedule, you should be able to find time to exercise.

Some of the recommended fitness activities for Nutrisystem include zumba, aerobics classes, walking, kickboxing, yoga, Pilates, biking, swimming, jogging, or even fitness video games.

All Nutrisystem members receive a customized 2 week fitness plan. As your fitness level improves, this plan will be adjusted. A sample fitness plan for the week might look like this:

-Monday: 10 minutes treadmill, 20 minutes stationary bike

-Tuesday: Total body circuit training workout

-Wednesday: 10 minute walk with a friend before breakfast, lunch, and dinner

-Thursday: Total body resistance band workout

-Friday: 20 minutes walking before breakfast, 10 minutes walking after dinner

-Saturday: 15 minutes of stair walking, 15 minutes of treadmill walking

-Sunday: Rest day

Ultimately, Nutrisystem claims you will lose weight on the program even if you don’t exercise at all. After all, you’re reducing your calorie count down to 1200 or 1500 calories per day. But to speed up your weight loss results even further, it’s recommended that you add exercise to your training program.

Nutrisystem Pricing

Here’s how Nutrisystem’s pricing works out:

Basic: $9.82 Per Day

-Pre-picked selection of popular foods

-4 Week plan with Turbo10

-Free FedEx shipping on every order

-Online tracking and support tools

Core: $10.54 Per Day

-Choose your own menu and pick the foods you like (choose from over 100 foods)

-Access to expert counsellors and dieticians

-Everything included in the Basic plan

Uniquely Yours: $11.96 Per Day

-The biggest variety of meals from which to choose (over 150)

-Order as much frozen food as you want

-Everything included in the Core plan

You can also choose a Vegetarian plan, which is priced at $11.96 per day. Or, you can choose the Diabetes plan, which features the same prices listed above but offers pre-picked foods specifically designed to help you manage your diabetes.

Each plan includes 4 weeks of food, including 3 meals every day of the week as well as 1 snack and 1 dessert.

Nutrisystem will often list a special price featuring 1 week of free food plus free shipping. That price is available to new customers.

Should You Use Nutrisystem to Lose Weight?

Nutrisystem is one of the oldest and best-known diet systems in the world today. With over 40 years of experience in the diet industry, Nutrisystem has legitimately helped millions of people lose weight while providing clinically backed advice from registered dieticians and weight loss specialists.

Let’s face it: one of the hardest parts of sticking to a diet is finding the time to cook healthy meals and go grocery shopping. Nutrisystem makes sure that’s not an issue by delivering all of the meals you need directly to your home every month. If you don’t want to cook or shop, then Nutrisystem may be the best choice for you – as long as you can afford it.