Andrea and Richard

The hunger pangs have resided, somewhat. Andrea and I aren’t nearly as hungry as we were starting or on the second day. We still have been very consistent with 2 days to go. So far Andrea has lost 5 pounds and I have lost a total of 3 pounds. 2 more days. I’ve also been drinking a lot more water than usual, at about 100 oz. now.

The second day on the Usana RESET Kit was not as bad as we thought. We’re still hungry, but surprisingly, neither of us are moody or grumpy. We’ve also noticed that if you keep busy, you don’t feel as hungry, but unfortunately once you sit down and have nothing to do or you see others start eating, you start getting hunger pangs.

So what was my weigh in for today? 239 pounds, a 1 pound loss.

What did we eat? For breakfast, Andrea had a vanilla shake and I had a chocolate. For a snack, I ate both the peanut butter and lemon ice tea bars. For lunch, I had the strawberry shake and a nectarine. One word of advice, the colder the shake, the better it taste. If you have time to blend the shakes in a blender, it’ll taste awesome. But because Andrea and I are always at break neck pace, we only have time to mix the shakes by hand, but we’ll add 2 or 3 ice cubes while shaking it to get it cold. It works. But at work, I have a tiny fridge, but no ice. So I make the shake 30 mins to 1 hour before lunch and stick it into the freezer, so by the time lunch time rolls around, I have a cold shake ready for me. For dinner, we had another shake, broccoli and cheese, a nectarine, a slice of Orowheat Double Fiber bread (sugarfree jam on Andrea’s and butter on mine), and a few pieces of watermelon.

I’ve also been drinking 80 oz. or more of water. It helps to get one of those portable water containers so you know exactly how much water you are drinking. It’s especially important to get enough water while doing the RESET so your body stays adequately hydrated.

Well, so far we feel fine, let’s see how day 3 goes.

So today Andrea and I decided to try our next Usana product: the 5 Day RESET Kit. It’s a nifty little thing, a 9″ x 9.25″ x 6″ box that contains 90% of everything you will eat for the next 5 days. Usana touts this as a weight loss product and a way to detox your body of toxins and carbohydrate cravings. We figured, what the hell, couldn’t hurt.

What Is It?

So the Usana 5 Day RESET Kit is comprised of 15 servings of Nutrimeal powder shakes (chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry), 5 Peanut Butter Crunch Nutrition Bars, 5 iced lemon Flavor Fibergy Bars, 5 HealthPak 100 AM/PM packets, a RESET DVD, a RESET program guide, and a RESET motivation magnet all nicely packaged and labeled.

What the RESET kit is a 5 day high fiber cleanse. Glancing at the nutritional data, the first thing you’ll notice is that everything is fairly high in carbs (if your doing Atkins). For example, the shakes contain 24 grams of net carbs (with fiber and sugar alcohol subtracted from the total) with 18 grams of sugar and the bars have about 16 grams of net carbs (11 grams of which are sugar). So right off the back, we’re a bit suspicious of the weight loss claims and solving the cravings because of the high levels of sugar. It should be noted that the kit doesn’t claim to be low carb, but rather low on the glycemic index.

How Does It Work?

So for five days, you are to follow a strict diet eating nothing but what is prescribed. You drink three shakes a day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which is your stable meal. You use the two bars as a snack in between and you are also allowed 1 serving of fruit and 1 serving of vegetable a day. You have to drink a minimum of 64-80 oz. of water in addition to the shakes. You are encouraged to walk 20-30 minutes a day for about 3,000 steps, but to avoid any strenuous exercise of athletic activity. Pretty simple.

Our Concerns

You may start wondering, that can’t possibly be enough calories a day. If you add up the calories for the shakes and the bars, the total caloric intake on those products alone come to 940 calories. For a male that is 150 pounds with light activity, he should be consuming about ~2360 calories. And for a women that is 115 pounds with light activity, that number should be ~1645 calories. Of course these are all rough averages, but it’s safe to say that a man and women should be roughly in the 2100-2300 and 1400-1600 calorie range, respectively. So if we are now consuming 940 calories and maybe add another 100 calories for the 1 serving of fruits and 1 serving of vegetables, we are looking at a 600-1300 average calorie deficiency! And people thought the Atkins Way of Life was radical. All it calls for is a reduction to 20 grams of healthy carbs for 1-2 week period.

One would expect to lose weight on a HUGE reduced calorie diet such as this. So this does make us skeptical about how one can maintain any weight loss through this method. Well after the RESET, or transformation, phase there is the maintenance phase in which you continue to replace one meal with the Nutrimeal shakes and change your eating habits to low glycemic meals with plenty of fruits and vegetables.

So skepticism aside, let’s try it out!

Our Goals

The primary goals I would like to achieve after the 5 day RESET is weight loss of at least 10 pounds (I currently weight 240 pounds as this morning), keep it off, and feel better in general. Andrea is just doing this with me not so much to lose weight (as she is already skinny and HOT), but to detox and provide an additional opinion.

Day 1 of 5: The Beginning

We both start off with the shakes, Andrea had the chocolate and I had the strawberry. Andrea thought the chocolate was OK in taste and the strawberry tasted fine to me. You mix the shake powder in 12 oz. of cold water. The amount of powder they give you to mix with 12 oz. of water definitely makes the shake taste creamy. It’s worth mentioning that Andrea worked out earlier than me this morning doing H.I.I.T (high intensity interval training), so when she had the shake, it definitely didn’t do anything to curb her hunger; she ended up eating both the bars at work before lunch.

For lunch, I had the peanut butter bar, it actually tasted good, but disappears in like 3 bites… Andrea had the same complaints and she ate both of them. Andrea had the strawberry shake and a plum.

I worked out for like barely 40 minutes on the elliptical trainer and had my vanilla shake. The vanilla shake is very plain. We are both quite hungry now.

For dinner I had the chocolate shake (which probably tastes the best of the three) with a sugar free strawberry Jello. Andrea had the vanilla shake, a plum, a sugar free jello, and a sugar free Dr. Pepper icicle. We also shared some mixed vegetables.

Day 2 is going to be hard, at least I can continue to have my Diet Coke.

One of our best secrets to better health is bread. Say what?! Bread normally gets a bad rep, processed grains, bad carbs, etc., but yet it remains the staple of many diets. But when companies such as Orowheat make bread such as double fiber bread, that changes things a bit. What’s so exciting about this double fiber whole wheat bread? Well for starters, we haven’t seen another bread with as much fiber (6g) for a single slice. For those who are following a low carb or glycemic index diet, the 6g of fiber can be subtracted from the 16g of carbs for a net carb of 10g per slice. This is also great because the size of a slice is as big and thick as regular bread! Some manufactures will purposely size the bread smaller so they can claim less carbs per slice and that’s not really low carb but rather smaller servings. And in may cases, they don’t change the recipe any. Just change the serving size, repackage it, and mark it up another 10-15% in price and call it low carb.

One major reason people probably don’t eat more fiber in their diet is the fear that fiber makes the food taste more like cardboard. Rest assured, this bread taste great and is healthy (or as healthy as bread can be…)! One thing to note about the double fiber bread when your toasting it, it burns easily, so be careful your not toasting it too long.

We’ve used this bread to make all sorts of things: sandwiches, French toast, grilled cheese, butter and toast, peanut butter and jam, etc. You’re only limited by your imagination.

So in an effort to lead a more healthy lifestyle, Andrea and I began taking multi-vitamins. At one point we were pretty consistent at taking multi-vitamins, but after a while of popping so many pills, it gets tedious.

So now we’re back on track. We’re also trying a bunch of Usana products, courtesy of my Hoai Nguyen. The first of the Usana products we will be using is the Usana HealthPak 100, a multi-vitamin that, according to the box, helps with heart, bones & joints, eyes, and lungs and contains Olivol.

What we particularly like best about the Usana HealthPak 100 is how they package the pills. Usana makes it very easy to take all the necessary pills. Each of the HealthPak comes with 56 packets, good for 4 weeks.  There are 12 pills you need to take total a day, conveniently packaged and split in two packs of 6 labeled AM and PM. And according to Andrea, packaging all the pills you need into simple packages like this makes it very easy to keep consistent. I agree.