Meal replacements are an effective weight-loss tool.

In fact, there are many reasons nutritionists, doctors, and fitness professionals use liquid meal replacements to aide in weight loss. It’s not a coincidence that many doctor-mediated weight loss programs include meal replacements.

Here are the 7 top benefits of meal replacements from nutritionist’s points of view:

Top 7 Benefits of Meal Replacements from Nutritionist’s Points of View

1. An Easy Start

All too often, weight loss programs require extreme initial changes that can overwhelm new participants. Sometimes, extreme lifestyle changes work, but it can also cause people to fail even before they start.

Meal replacements offer an easy start.

Since they require only one change (drinking a replacement for one or more meals), there’s very little to learn initially.

But they can’t stop there. As you’ll read, lifestyle changes must be taught for long-term success. But as a start, meal replacements are an easy change.

2. Cut Calories without Counting

As long as participants follow simple directions to consume the meal replacement, they will easily cut calories without counting calories, grams or other nutrients. This is a big advantage over many “diet programs.”

Cutting calories is a proven weight loss plan for many people (1). But, it can become tedious, difficult, and overwhelming.

Meal replacements allow one to cut calories without counting.

3. High Fat, Low-Carb Meal Replacements Can Be a Quick Transition into the Keto Zone

Especially when used in conjunction with exogenous ketones, like Instant Ketones, a high fat, low-carbohydrate meal replacement can help anyone get into the Keto Zone quickly and without keto flu symptoms.

To get into the Keto Zone, it’s required that you cut carbohydrates down to just around 20 net grams of carbohydrates while increasing fat into about 75% of total calories.

While this can be challenging when consuming everyday foods, cutting carbs is easy when a meal replacement is formulated with this macronutrient balance.

4. Liquid Meals Provide Many of the Same Benefits as Fasting

Fasting provides many health benefits to the human body. But, most people can only handle so much fasting.

Believe it or not, consuming an all-liquid diet for a period of time mimics fasting, and provides many of the same benefits.

In fact, intermittent fasting can provide many documented benefits including:

• Improve cholesterol markers
• Reduced triglycerides
• Improved aging
• Weight loss without negative cellular adaptations
• Reduced risk of diabetes
• Reduced risk of cancer and improved treatment tolerance (2)

In fact, studies show that liquid meals result in lower blood glucose and improved insulin sensitivity, similar to fasting (3).

5. Reduced Gut Inflammation

In clinical medical situations, patients are often given “gut rest” in order to begin healing an injured or sick gut.

This means they either fast for a short period or receive a liquid diet.  The same is prescribed after injury, surgery, and more.

When patients begin receiving a liquid diet, their gut health, immune function, and overall health being to improve. What’s more, in clinical studies of people with irritable bowel disease, a full liquid diet has been shown to reduce inflammation significantly, induce remission, and improve gut health (4,5,6).

While not everyone has a digestion disease, many adults suffer from different states of inflammation in the digestive tract and throughout the body. Liquid meal replacements may help.

6. Meal Replacements Effectively Jump-Start Weight Loss or Break Plateaus

There’s little doubt when dieters have early success, they are more motivated to continue with the dietary changes in the long-term.

Meal replacement shakes provide an easy, effective early success intervention.

In fact, one recent 2019 study showed that weight loss participants who had early weight loss success had a great percent weight change later in the program – at 3 and 6 months. In fact, 5 times more early weight loss participants met their goals than later weight loss participants.

What’s more, meal replacement shakes offer an effective tool to break plateaus. Just like a jump-start in the beginning, breaking weight loss plateaus is an important part of the weight loss journey.

7. Meal Replacements Can Provide a Mental Shift

For many people, physical change and results follow a mental shift.

For example, once they truly believe they have a new eating lifestyle and not an on-again-off-again diet, they begin to see results.

When meal replacement shakes are used, especially exclusively as a jump-start to a new eating lifestyle, they provide this mental shift. They draw a line between the former way of eating and the new.

Bottom Line

Especially within a Keto Zone Lifestyle, there are many different foods and drinks you can choose to lose weight. Meal replacement shakes can be a wonderful tool.

They offer many benefits from ease to mental benefits to quick ketosis. When used alongside dietary instruction for long-term lifestyle changes, there are many benefits of meal replacements.