If you've found this article, I suspect that you are where I was more than a year ago.  You're probably researching the Medifast diet, wanting to know it's pros and cons, it's advantages and disadvantages, and whether it would be a good fit for you.  With the distance of time and the success that I have had on this diet, I'm probably a bit biased, but I've been on it long enough to tell you what I feel are the top advantages of it and why it works for most people, which I will do in the following article.

The Biggest Medifast Advantage: Convenience:  Let's face it.  Diets are hard.  No one really gets overly excited about tallying calories, making decisions about what you are going to eat, and then going out and shopping for and then preparing the "special" food yourself.  It's a lot of work and if you have a family, it can be a real pain to have to prepare food for yourself and then fix separate meals for them.

This diet alleviates a lot of these steps.  When you sign onto the program, you're given a month's worth of prepackaged foods. You will eat six times per day.  But, five of these times, the company provides the food for you.  You don't have to tally up anything or count calories.  You just eat the foods you are given and you're fine.  Once per day, you are asked to eat a fresh, "lean and green" meal that you make on your own. 

But, this isn't as hard as it sounds.  The lean and green is basically lean protein and veggies.  So, you can easily incorporate this in your family's meal.  You won't have to make a separate one.  You just won't partake in everything that your family may be eating.  I like to use the George Foreman grill and bagged salad for this.  I can prepare my lean and green in under 5 minutes and it doesn't hurt my family to eat more salad either.

Medifast Pro Number Two: It's Pretty Inexpensive: If you compare this diet to similar plans like Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, and Jenny Craig, you'll find that it is cheaper.  Also, this company is really generous with the coupons and specials. The base price of a months worth of food is $299, but if you have a promo or coupon code, you can often get a significant amount off of this total or at least two weeks worth of free food.  This often gets your cost per meal under or around $2 each, which is hard to beat - even for low cost groceries.

Huge Plus Number Three: Medifast Is Very Effective And Fast Because Of Ketosis:  I alluded to this before, but I believe that this diet works quickly and dramatically for many people because of a process called ketosis.  Because the foods are high in protein and low in carbs and calories, your body is sort of tricked into a metabolic state where your body burns fat instead of carbohydrates.  This is how diets like South Beach and Atkins work,  but this diet is far less painful than those.  You aren't eating meat and eggs all day and you have a lot of dessert and snack type options to chose from.

There is a John Hopkins study which indicated that people on this diet lost twice and much weight and stuck with the diet for twice as long as the folks on the comparison diet. From my experience, I understand why this is true. The food isn't too bad.  The results come quickly.  There is not a lot of work and calculations involved, and the food is pretty much prepared for and provided for you.