Quite often I’ve looked at those diet plans – you know, the ones where you choose a meal plan and the food is sent to you and all you need to do is heat it up. And each time, I’ve thought, that looks like a good idea but they’re so expensive and, anyway, I bet the food’s all processed rubbish and just a marketing ploy for lazy, gullible people with too much money.
But I put all my prejudices aside when Bodychef asked me if I wanted to try out one of their diet plans, especially when I looked at the vegetarian menus on the website and thought ‘yum’.
There are over 15 plans to choose from on the Bodychef website, including low GI, low carb, 5:2, clean & lean and, of course, vegetarian, and the menus for each plan are available to view before you commit to anything. Each plan contains all the food you need for a week, including snacks. The only thing they don’t provide is milk but although you have to provide that yourself (if you drink it), an allowance for it has been made in your plan, so you won’t be going over your calorie count if you have some with your cereal/hot drinks.
Setting up your plan is easy. As is usual with these diety things, you’re asked your height and weight and activity level and stuff, so Bodychef can calculate your calorie needs. The odd thing about the plan is, is that it starts with Tuesday dinner. I’d been hoping to do my trial on a more traditional Monday to Friday basis, but I suppose as Bodychef suggests people do the diet for a month or more, then it would end up being Monday-Friday anyway and wouldn’t seem so weird.
Once they have all your details and you’ve picked your plan, you can tweak it. Don’t like blueberries? No problem; choose something else. Not everything is swappable but there was only one thing on the week’s menu I wanted to swap anyway. Everything else I was happy with.
The day before my first delivery was due to arrive (you get two deliveries a week, so the food is as fresh as possible – well, fresher than it would be if you were only getting one delivery for the whole week), I received an email with a pdf of the menu, cooking instructions and nutritional information and a cheery delivery driver turned up with my hamper of food at around 9am the next day.
Inside this box was a polystyrene box filled with the food and ice packs. There’s also another copy of the menu, cooking instructions and nutritional info.
In the photo above is the food for Tuesday dinner to Friday lunch (I hunted in the box for the pizza and wine but, alas, they must have forgot to deliver that). Bodychef calculated my daily calorie needs to be 1200, which sounds low, but I’d told them my activity was low, i.e. I spend most of the day sitting down in front of a computer working really hard and not wasting any time on Facebook. Although I do usually exercise regularly, I’ve been a bit slack lately, so I reckoned if I did do a lot of exercise while I was on the diet plan and got hungry, then I’d just eat something healthy. (I’m getting ahead of myself in this post but I’m two days into the diet and although I’ve exercised every day, I haven’t needed to eat anything extra yet.)
As you can see in the photo, everything has been weighed out, put in packets and labelled.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting each packet to be labelled so thoroughly with when it was to be eaten, what it was and how many calories it contained. I sorted them all out into their daily piles and cleared a shelf in the fridge for my week’s food.
As Tuesday’s food wasn’t starting until dinner time, I was briefly tempted into thinking that meant I could eat whatever I wanted until the diet started but I was ‘good’ and had a healthy salad wrap for lunch.
I’m going to end this post here, as I’m going to blog each day’s food and how I felt about it the next day. I’ll apologise now for the state of the kitchen (which is currently being demolished/decorated) and the food photos which might not be the best they could be but I want to post about this diet from the perspective of a real person doing it for real, and real people have messy kitchens and take quick photos of their food before it gets cold and don’t dick about for three hours trying to get that perfect shot (actually real people just eat their food without taking photos of it, but you know what I mean).
Special offer for Planet Veggie readers
If you’d like to try out the Bodychef diet, readers of Planet Veggie can get 15% off any plan by using the code PLANET15.
Related posts:
Bodychef Vegetarian Diet Plan – Day 1
Bodychef Vegetarian Diet Plan – Day 2
Bodychef Vegetarian Diet Plan – Day 3
Bodychef Vegetarian Diet Plan – Day 4
Bodychef Vegetarian Diet Plan – Day 5
Bodychef Vegetarian Diet Plan – Day 6
Bodychef Vegetarian Diet Plan – Day 7
Bodychef Vegetarian Diet Plan – Day 8 – Final Day
