Weight loss programs can be a very useful tool to provide structure and accountability to your journey. They take out the thinking and give you access to professionals in the field and more often than not, a community to motivate you along the way.
It’s no secret that millions of Americans every year embark on a weight loss journey. They’re unhappy with their current physique and lifestyle and need some change.
In conjunction with exercise, diet is the most important factor in promoting long-term weight loss.
In order to get the best results make sure you…
- Tailor your weight loss program to fit your personal lifestyle and particular goals
- Factor in exercise restrictions and dietary needs into your program to eliminate any complications
- Ensure that the program you choose has a community and motivational component to help long term adherence
Our Winners
Best overall weight loss program: Nutrisystem
Best weight loss program for women: Nutrisystem
Best weight loss program for men: Bigger Leaner Stronger
Best online weight loss program: Noom
Best fast weight loss program: The 28-Day Dash Diet
Rankings
1. Nutrisystem
Nutrisystem is one of the longest-standing weight loss programs out there and continues to grow and develop with its customers. With over 150 nutritionally balanced meals, you don’t have to worry about missing out on anything. They offer a ton of recipes that are not only healthy but also cater to your cravings to ensure you stay on track.
There are different plans to choose from so even if you are vegetarian or have diabetes, you can benefit from this program. With 6 meals per day, you are left totally satisfied and everything is made easier with their new fully integrated app.
There’s no question that this is food4me.org’s #1 overall weight loss program.
2. Noom
Noom uses a very unique approach to weight loss by focusing on behavior change to allow their customers to lead healthier lives for the rest of their lives.
To start you must take a quiz that’s no longer than 5 minutes. It’s incredibly in-depth and goes through your demographics, habits, and behaviors as well as activity and nutrition.
3. The 28-Day DASH Weight-Loss Program
If you are looking to shed some weight fast, this 28-day DASH diet may be just what you have been looking for. This program offers a holistic diet and lifestyle plan to help you achieve your goals.
Including over 100 low-calorie, balanced meals, this weight loss program will provide you with everything you need to get results if you stick to it. This program also contains some guidance on exercise and what to do after the 28 days making it a great choice at an extremely low cost.
4. Bigger, Leaner, Stronger
Mike Matthews has laid out everything you need to build your best physique yet. There are detailed chapters on the science behind weight loss and muscle building, giving you a thorough understanding of what’s involved.
This book lays out 12-week workout programs based on how many days you would like to work out and also how to follow the perfect diet for your body. Ladies, don’t worry, if you think like the idea of science-backed weight loss and toning your muscles, Mike Matthews has written a female version called Thinner, Leaner, Stronger; check it out!
5. The Mayo Clinic Diet Second Edition
The Mayo Clinic Diet comes with the guarantee that you are getting advice from some of the top medical facilities in the world. This revised edition comes with 2 sections; Lose it and Live it.
You will learn how to kick start your weight loss with a two-week program and move into a maintenance phase to learn how to continue losing slowly or maintain what you have lost. You also have access to tons of healthy recipes, grocery lists and meal plans to make your experience as simplified as possible.
6. WW (Weight Watchers)
This new and improved WeightWatchers has combined its old and very successful points-based system and revamped it with some new tech. They now offer WW+, which includes a more holistic approach to your specific weight loss goals and even an app to make tracking easy.
If you have issues with blood sugar or any health issues like metabolic syndrome, you may want to look for something that is a bit more restrictive.
7. P90X3
P90X has been around for quite some time with thousands of happy customers. This new version gives you the most bang for your buck as the workouts are only 30 minutes long.
This package includes 16 workout videos, a fitness guide, a nutrition plan, a workout calendar, and Tony Horton as your trainer. These videos contain different methods of training, and all together with the nutrition will give you great results.
8. The Super-Charged Hormone Diet by Natasha Turner
Hormones play a significant role in our body’s ability to lose weight but also where and how we may put on fat. Dr. Natasha Turner lays out a 30-day program to help readers get a hold of their hormone imbalances, and get on the path of healthy, balanced weight loss.
The book includes a meal plan, grocery list, a body assessment to set your goals, and even a hormonal health profile to identify imbalances. This program can be restrictive, so keep that in mind if that’s not something you are able to commit to.
9. 21-Day Ketogenic Diet Weight Loss Challenge
This holistic approach to weight loss includes a 21-day ketogenic diet to help you lose weight and optimize your health long term.
It includes over 100 keto-friendly meals as well as exercise recommendations, sleep hygiene practices, and stress management.
10. The FastDiet
The FastDiet is a diet based around the intermittent fasting dieting regime. This revised and updated version is full of new science and recipes for you to incorporate fasting into your life.
The diet works by taking two nonconsecutive days of the week and eating very low-calorie those days. The other five days you are eating as you normally would with no restrictions.
Best Weight Loss Program for Men
Bigger, Leaner, Stronger takes the top spot for weight loss programs for men.
It’s intuitive and explains every detail of both nutrition and exercise to help you lose weight and get shredded. The information is also all scientifically backed as well as geared towards men specifically.
Best Weight Loss Program for Women
Ranked one of the best weight loss programs on the market currently, the main attribute built into its name is nutrition.
Taking the number one spot for female weight loss program due to its ease of following the structured meal plans as well as no calorie counting required.
Best Online Weight Loss Program
Noom follows the online trend that allows you to connect and stay on track anywhere you are.
It tackles all key components of health and specifically works on behavior change. Incorporating an easy-to-use app with great tools to help you lose weight, and a community to support you in the process, there isn’t much more you could ask for.
Best Weight Loss Program for Fast Results
This 28-day weight loss program will give you safe and fast results in less than a month.
With so many different recipes to chose from, this program is perfect if you want to kick start your results and improve both nutrition and exercise in your life.
Best Weight Loss Exercise Program
Tony Horton brings the same contagious energy to this new and improved P90X3 exercise program.
With the workouts being only 30 mins long, you are getting the most out of each workout and not worrying about having to spend hours working out.
The workouts are for men and women and have different difficulty levels to follow in each exercise to ensure you can complete the workout at your experience level.
Who Should Use Weight Loss Programs?
Weight loss programs are an amazing tool that anyone can use to help guide and motivate you to reach your fitness goals. The great part is there are so many different programs to chose from, you can really find one that fits exactly what you are looking to achieve.
These programs allow anyone, whether a beginner or an expert, to benefit from the structure. The key to weight loss is building up routines and habits; weight loss programs provide you exactly that. The structure and habit-based programs provide you with much-needed guidance to follow the path and stay on that path long term.
Many of these programs contain suggestions on nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress management to give you a well-rounded program and lifestyle change. Your progress is basically up to you, and the success you can see will be dependent on how well you can stick to the program over many weeks and months.
However, if you are someone who experienced weight gain due to an injury or biological issue, such as a thyroid disorder, you need to consult with a medical professional. Your doctor may inform you to be taking some medication in conjunction with your weight loss program of choice to aid your results. Otherwise, these weight loss programs are typically created for people leading a very sedentary life while eating too much of the wrong things.
If you are pregnant or nursing or are someone who has diabetes, you should do some additional research on the weight loss program you are thinking of starting to make sure you aren’t going to harm your body.
Methodology
To create our list, we used foundational weight loss needs and ensured that each of the programs contained them as part of their framework. Generic diets did not make the cut because, in order to lose weight, you need a total lifestyle change instead of quick changes. These types of programs will give you the opportunity to maintain your results long-term instead of bouncing back to your pre-program body with 5 pounds of interest.
Nutrition: one of the biggest portions of weight loss, in general, is nutrition. Programs that focused on this were rated highly due to the level of importance that it carries when trying to follow a program. If you think about it, you only really exercise in total per day between 1-3 hours; however, you have more than 16 hours in the day to possibly be eating. Because of this drastic time allocation, putting an emphasis on what you’re eating, and how you go about it is very important. Nutrisystem places a huge emphasis on nutrition and is one of the reasons why it was our overall winner.
Holistic approach: In order to see long-lasting results for weight loss, you have to do a little more than just change one thing in your life. Choosing programs that incorporate different aspects of health was important for our rankings. Tackling things like biological factors, nutrition, exercise, lifestyle changes, and more altogether, are important to see true change.
Programs like noom do a great job at emphasizing this in their programs. They focus their efforts on making behavioral changes to ensure that you aren’t putting a bandaid on the problem but rather tackling every aspect of a healthy lifestyle to ensure all-around good results.
Timely: Weight loss programs lose their appeal if you have to wait a long time to see results. Although you won’t see instant gratification from any weight loss program, we chose programs that guaranteed results in 90 days or less. The programs on this list will provide you with sustainable weight loss that will provide you with results in a timely manner to keep you wanting more.
The 28-Day DASH Diet is a perfect example where you’ll see amazing results in less than a month if you commit to achieving your goals.
Proven: Last but not least, we looked for programs that had proven results and good feedback. This gave us the assurance that these programs do in fact work and have worked for many people previously. It becomes difficult to trust if a weight loss program is only endorsed by its creator and doesn’t have any real testimonies proving its effectiveness.
Benefits
Weight loss programs do exactly what they say, help you lose weight. Unless you have a medical condition needed to be monitored by your doctor, weight loss programs are fairly easy to follow on your own. They gave give you the tools you need in order to achieve your goals while having some guidance so you aren’t left wondering what to do.
Obesity is on the continuous rise, and because of this, so are the health consequences that come with obesity. Enrolling in a weight loss program will be hugely beneficial to your weight, but also to your overall health and well-being. It’s important to understand that making dietary changes is important, but they aren’t the only thing to allow you to finally reach your goals.
Losing weight with the guidance of a program can kick start your all-around lifestyle changes, and in some cases save your life. There are no downsides to enrolling in a program and research has proven that programs focusing on nutrition, behavioral change, and social support found a great weight loss result in most of the women who took them (1).
Weight loss programs provide structure and guidance to a seemingly impossible task. There is so much fluff online in regards to weight loss it’s incredibly overwhelming to even know where to begin. Weight loss programs will give you the structure needed for you to consistently stay on track and know exactly what needs to get done day-to-day.
A study was done looking at a structured and supervised diet and exercise program versus a meal replacement diet program. These scientists concluded that the participants in the group following the structured program showed much better results in promoting and maintaining weight loss. It also showed an increase in other health markers and fitness (2).
The structure takes the thinking out of it and you can essentially operate on autopilot. The workouts, diet, behaviors are all mapped out for you, and all you have to do is follow. The alternative is much more work and will almost always end up falling off the diet in a very short amount of time.
Weight loss programs give you the community experience that will help you get through your tough days and celebrate the great ones. Losing weight can feel like a very lonely experience which is why most programs offer to join a Facebook group or be part of their community in other ways. You can see people from all walks of life, with similar goals, going through the same thing you are.
People who join these groups and communities are typically looking for more support and the feeling of being part of something. These groups also typically have zero tolerance for putting people down making it an extremely positive and uplifting experience. Research has shown that internet weight loss communities play an extremely important role in the efforts made to achieve the participant’s goals (3).
Weight Watchers for example has been wildly successful and a large part is due to their placed emphasis on social support. They provide 24/7 online chatting and you get access to their digital community where you can join group meetings and even get one on one additional support.
Having a social support system plays into your potential success at losing weight and the biggest part, keeping it off.
Weight loss programs help to decrease your body fat. Weight loss programs, especially the ones that have exercise in addition to nutrition, will allow you to not only lose weight but body fat. It can be very dangerous to have excess body fat in your midsection that sits and coats your internal organs. Following a program can help get rid of some of that fat and give your body a chance to operate the way it’s meant to.
A study looking at intermittent fasting found that participants following this diet regime showed reduced fat, regardless of the individual (4).
Weight loss programs can help with both short and long-term weight loss. Many of these programs are typically 3 months long, but the short-term and long-term benefits you can get are everlasting. This process is highly educational in learning about nutrition, proper portions, lifestyle changes, and exercise.
If you follow the programs diligently, you will see the short-term results you have set out. Because you have taken the time and the energy to learn and achieve your weight loss goal, this will naturally motivate you to keep going. It can get difficult to monitor and stay accountable long term, but if you use the tools you learned in the program and keep up with your social support system, you have every opportunity to maintain your hard-earned work.
Weight loss programs improve different aspects of health by pushing you to solidify change and achieve true weight loss. The best programs will provide you with different health attributes to work on throughout to promote overall change.
Yes, eating in a severe caloric deficit will cause you to lose weight, it won’t however teach you how to eat a balanced, healthy diet to fuel your body. So although you will see short-term weight loss, because there was no focus on behavioral change, this weight loss probably won’t be long-lasting. Weight loss programs will provide you with different things to work on like exercise diet and sleep in order to provide you with true change in your body.
Weight loss programs are tailored to specific needs and lifestyles. It is very rare that you will find two people with exactly the same schedule, dietary needs, or exercise requirements. Weight loss programs are meant to be personalized in order to accommodate the thousands of people joining the initiative.
Taking questionnaires, talking with support teams, and reading about different avenues you can take with a program can help you find the perfect fit for you and your life. This is so important for a couple of reasons; adherence to the program and also making it fit who you are.
Having it be adjustable is also beneficial to accommodate changes in your life. If you are planning for long-term weight loss, it’s possible that something in your life may change in 6 months and something you committed to at the beginning of your program may not be applicable anymore. Having the freedom to switch it up, add or take away will help you stay more on track and allow you to move and change with your life without needing to give up or switch your weight loss protocols.
Recap
Weight loss programs are an excellent way to provide you with the structure and lifestyle change you may have been lacking to take you through to the end of your goal.
Typically tackling multiple avenues of health, wellness, and fitness, these weight loss programs will push you to the next level and give you the support you will need. There are a ton out there to choose from so don’t worry if you don’t find one you love right off the bat.
This multifaceted approach to a weight loss program will help you lose weight, get educated, and keep the weight off long term.
For food4me.org’s #1 weight loss program recommendation, click here.