Jenny Craig: My Thoughts
Jenny Craig was founded in the early 1980s. It is now one of the largest weight management services in the world. Their stated goals are for clients to have a healthy relationship with food, move more/active lifestyle, and to live a balanced life. Well intentioned goals to be sure.
If you sign up for Jenny Craig, you will get prepackaged low-calorie food and online tools to help you plan and track meals. In terms of exercise, Jenny Craig clients work with a consultant to reach a goal of 30 minutes or more of moderate activity at least 5 days a week.
Let’s attempt to address what Jenny Craig offers their clients. The prepackaged foods contain many cheap additives that have been shown to potentially increase the risk for obesity and other issues. I cannot review the food much better than Monica Reinagel, chief nutritionist for NutritionData.com:
"The foods you provide are definitely the healthiest part of this diet plan…
"The meals are quite low in calories (fewer than 300 calories for most). Without much fat or fiber to keep your blood-sugar levels steady and your appetite in check, you'll be chewing your arm off 90 minutes after every meal.
"The ingredient lists were also unimpressive, dominated by additives, artificial ingredients, added sugars, and hydrogenated oils (i.e., trans fats) [1]
The healthiest part of Jenny Craig meals are the groceries that you bought, cook and add to it! I could just end the review right there. I have a novel idea, since the groceries you buy are healthier than the prepackaged meals, just continue to buy groceries, save yourself a ton of money and be better off.
The meals as demonstrate a lack of understanding of satiety. There is more to losing weight than eating very little calories. You must be learning habits and skills that you can take with you on your fitness journey. Sure, you can eat these very low calorie meals, feel ravenously hungry, and lose weight. However, I would ask, how long can you maintain that? From Jenny Craig’s website, they mention their lowest calorie plan is 1200 but it may be higher as it does take into account age, height, weight, gender and activity level. There’s not much I can say without more data, but I will say that 1200 calories would be inappropriate for almost everyone. There is a reason programs like Jenny Craig have initial success, it is due to severe caloric restriction. Of course you will lose weight if you drastically reduce calories, but you cannot stay on a vastly restricted diet forever.
There are a few more issues with their meals. First:
Past research suggests moderate-fat, calorie-restricted diets often skimp on calcium, zinc, magnesium, iron, vitamin B-12 and dietary fiber. [2]
Second, what do you do when you are done with the program? Having a consultant is one thing, but an online consultant isn’t going to be in your kitchen teaching your how cook. I suppose you could transition from Jenny Craig into store bought packaged/frozen meals, but now we are looking at consuming additives and preservatives indefinitely. Not a recipe for a healthy you if you ask me. The transition to shopping and cooking on your own after months of consuming their products seems like a pretty big obstacle to me.
Third, how will you afford it? Or why would you want to? The monthly fee for the program is about $15 to 19 [3]. But that does not include the food! The average cost of food each day is between $15 and $26, according to the company [4]. That is $450 to $780 per MONTH on food for ONE person. I can feed a family of four on the lower end of that spectrum. If you are willing to shell out $450 (and keep in mind that is on the low end) for a month’s worth of food for one person, please consider how well you could eat if you were buying groceries. You could eat nice steaks, fresh fish, fantastic produce every day and still spend less!
Much like my feedback of Weight Watchers, why would Jenny Craig which ostensibly wants you to be a healthier version of yourself, sell foods with such poor quality ingredients? I honestly cannot get my head around it. Someone who wants to be healthier should be eating foods as close to their natural state as possible. I hope most of your food has an ingredient list of one or two items. Added sugar? Can we please learn to taste and enjoy food for what it was supposed to be? Why add sugar to everything?
As a client of Jenny Craig, you will also have access to their online tools. This includes members-only forums, chat rooms, and blogs, as well as online journaling tools to track what you eat and how active you are. Not much to add here, like I mentioned with Weight Watchers, online support is only beneficial if the people you interact with are actually knowledgeable and friendly. When you think of internet forums, knowledgeable and friendly are typically not the first two words that come to mind. And the journaling and tracking tools? There are already plenty of excellent free options to track with, you do not need to join an expensive program to have access to these tools.
In terms of exercise, if you paid the more expensive monthly rate, you would work with a consultant to reach a goal of 30 minutes or more of moderate activity at least 5 days a week. It is unclear how much guidance they give, from what I could find, it appears to be more about encouragement and not guidance as to what you should be doing with those 30 minutes. You may just be wasting those 30 minutes without someone to help you learn how to best use your time and existing resources to train.
Let me save you the $500 or more per month you would be spending on food and a membership. Let me help you invest your time and money wisely.
https://www.epicurious.com/archive/healthy/news/dietdelivery_jennycraig
https://health.usnews.com/best-diet/jenny-craig-diet/health-and-nutrition
http://www.jennycraig.com/site/shop-plans
http://www.jennycraig.com/
