Jenny Craig

Jenny Craig is not a miracle worker. She’s not a prophet, and she doesn’t have a magic wand to make you get skinny. This may come as disparaging news to you, but it’s true. The new and improved melt-away-the-pounds-while-you-sleep machine doesn’t work either. There is no silver bullet, no cure-all drug to get rid of fat. Jenny Craig and her cronies would like to make you think that their food or their programs or their pills or their machines are going to make you lose weight. However, every time you see their ads on television or read them in magazines, have you noticed how everyone advocates using their weight loss program in addition to a healthy diet and exercise?

I’ll let you in on a little secret that Jenny Craig doesn’t want you to hear. The diet and exercise that they recommend? That’s enough to lose weight. Shocking, I know, but true.

Regardless of what weight loss program you’re interested in, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Boflex, or any of the others, all of them work on one infallible principle: if you burn more calories than you take in, you’re going to lose weight. It’s that simple. The hit-and-miss television show The Biggest Looser highlighted this idea, dispelling the fantasy of the before and after photos presented in the weight loss ads of overweight housewives or beer-bellied husbands dropping a hundred pounds in a few weeks. It just isn’t true, which the little disclaimer at the bottom of the screen, “results not typical,” hints at.

This isn’t to say that Jenny Craig and her contemporaries are completely off base. Both Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers endeavor to help you lose weight by offering you pre-determined portions of food which, in turn, limits the number of calories you eat every day. If you were paying attention you could exhibit this sort of self-control on your own, but it’s admittedly easier to allow someone else to do the number and calorie-crunching. However, if you remember, diet is only part of the equation. If you’re still eating more calories than you’re burning, you’re going to keep gaining weight. So go move around for awhile. “Exercise” doesn’t have to be lifting weights at the gym, it can be walking your dog around the block a few more times or biking back and forth to work a few days a week. Go for a walk in the woods or jump rope for twenty minutes every day; whatever you do, if you burn more calories than you eat, you’ll begin to see the pounds fade away.