What To Look For When Considering Meal Replacement Shakes

 

If you’re on an 8 pack ab diet plan, one thing that you’ve been doing is planning out your meals religiously.  If there’s one thing you don’t have room for in your approach, it’s errors in meal calculations.

If you want to get down to the low body fat levels required to see clearly visible abs, you absolutely must be making sure that you’re hitting your calorie mark target each and every day.

When times get busy, this is much easier said than done.  If you often find yourself falling off your diet plan simply because it’s just too difficult to cook and prepare all the meals and snacks you’ve having throughout the day, you may want to look into using a meal replacement shake instead.

These are going to earn top marks in terms of providing you with a careful balance of proteins, carbs, and fats, and are also completely calorie controlled.

But, if you hope to see good results from that MRS, it’s important to know what to look for.

Let’s give you a brief run-down of what you need to check out.

The Calorie Content

The very first thing that you must check out is how many calories are in the shake that you’re thinking of using.  Realize that meal replacement shakes come in a wide variety of different calorie levels from 150 calories all the way up to 600 calories or more.

Obviously this will have a big difference on the progress you’re making with your fat loss diet, so it will be imperative that you’re choosing one that’s the right level for you.

Generally if you’re using it to replace a meal, you’ll want something around 300-350 calories in most cases and for a snack replacement, aim for the 150-250 range.

This will easily fit into your diet and shouldn’t throw you off course.

The Sugar And Fiber Content

Next, you also want to consider the sugar and fiber content as well.  In an ideal situation, you want there to be more grams of fiber than there is sugar and the sugar itself should come in at under 1 gram per 100 calories (or as close to that as possible).

If you’re using a MRS that contains five grams of sugar, two grams of fiber, and 200 calories, you could find that this spikes your blood glucose levels higher and brings about hunger that you’d rather avoid.

Many companies are making an effort to add more fiber into the MRS in order to promote higher satiety after using them.

The Protein Content

Next, be sure to look at the protein content.  Ideally you’ll want at least 10 grams of protein for every 100 calories. This would then equate to at least 40% of the calories coming from protein, which is about where you want to be on an 8 pack ab diet plan.

The protein content may be slightly higher than this in some cases and that’s fine.  As long as it’s at the right level for your diet plan – that’s the important thing.

Also try and aim to get a MRS that has a mixture of types of proteins including whey and casein.

The Source Of Dietary Fats

Finally, last but not least, make sure that you’re checking out the sources of fats in the plans.  You want to make sure that it doesn’t contain too much saturated fat, unless you see coconut oil or medium chain triglycerides on the ingredient listing.

These are a form of saturated fat but they are much healthier than normal saturated fat, so it will be fine to take them in.

If they contain omega fats, all the better as well.

So there you have the need-to-know requirements of a good MRS.  Make sure you do a thorough examination of any you plan to use to make sure that it stands up to the 8 pack ab diet test.