Review – Exante Diet – VLCD Meal Replacement Diet

I love food, I love my chocolate and I do not have regular meals as I should have… I like to eat in the evening, ideally after 10pm while watching some fascinating series on the TV as this is the time of the day I get really hungry… all of this put together means that I could do with losing some weight… so either I find some extra time for some “additional” exercises or I go on a diet…

There is no extra time during my 24h so diet it is…

I was offered to try Exante Diet, which is a meal replacement diet, for a week. Sure, why not – I thought to myself –how hard it could be… So, I said “yes, please” without giving it a second thought.

A few days later my VLCD meals arrived (VLCD stands for Very Low Calorie Diet… just in case you didn’t know that🙂)

So what did arrive in my pack?

• Porridge oats x 1
• Shakes x 6 in 4 different flavours: vanilla, chocolate, banana and strawberry
• Diet bars x 3 in 2 flavours: toffee, nut & raison and chocolate orange
• Soups x 11 in 4 different flavours: vegetable, tomato & basil, mushroom, Thai chicken

My food for the entire week – 21 packs… that’s it!

Scary isn’t it? These 21 packets will feed me for a week… no snacking, no fruit, no proper food… just my VLCD meals and a lot of water…

I was going to do a Total Solution Exante Diet, which means I can only have 3 Exante products a day and there must be no additional meals, this would give me a daily intake of 600 calories.

After day one I knew that this isn’t going to happen… so I checked the website and decided to amend my weekly eating plan. I opted to change my plan into the Working Solution plan, which is a LCD diet (Low Calories Diet), which allows you 3 Exante Meals a day + an additional meal which in total cannot exceed 1000 calories (or 1200 calories on the Simple Solution Plan). This was the only way I could survive my weekly ordeal… I mean trail.

So how did it go?

It wasn’t so easy. Not so much because I was hungry and irritable, but because there was all this lovely food around and I couldn’t really have it. I think my state of mind was/is my biggest enemy. There is a lot of chocolate bars in the pantry or other sweets as Mark makes confectionary, and sometimes they will be there for weeks or even months, I will open the pantry have a look at them and decided no, not today and pick an apple or an orange instead… but as soon as I knew that I cannot have them (or let’s say shouldn’t have them)… all I could think about was those yummy chocolate bars hiding from me…

How were the meals?

Good, at least most of them. I didn’t receive any dinner like meals – no shepherd’s pie, no spaghetti Bolognese, no red bean chilli… which at first made me a bit panicky… if there are no dinner packs what will I eat…? but then I had soups…

These are actually very tasty

From all the products received and eaten the Diet Bars were definitely my favourite. They look like standard food, they taste good and I really enjoyed them. I am almost sure I could survive on 3 bars a day 😉

Diet shakes were my 2^nd favourite… I actually enjoyed all the flavours provided. The strawberry one could have had a slightly stronger taste for me, so when making it for the second time I just added less water… Checking Exante website I discover that there is so many more flavours to choose from – Chocolate Mint or Toffee Carmel look especially appealing to me…

Soups were all good if you spiced them up a bit… my thinking was that spices speed up your digestion process so it cannot hurt if I add a bit of fresh ground pepper or few chilli flakes… The soups were quick and easy to prepare, you just didn’t get a lot of it 😦

Porridge Oats… hmm… this is really not my cup of tea… or bowl of porridge… if you prefer. I am not a big fan of porridge, so I cannot really tell you if Exante porridge is any good as I have nothing to compare it to. One thing which I can tell you, you get 200ml of it, which is a lot for a morning meal… or at least it was looking a lot to me.

Would I do it again?

Yes, but…

I would do it again but with my personal choice of products. I think with the right mind-set the Excante diet could be very easy and almost a pleasurable way of losing weight.

Did I lose any weight or cm?

Yes. Even with my amended plan I lost 1.2kg during the week. It may not seems like a lot but…

• I don’t have soooo much weight to lose
• I didn’t follow the recommended procedure to the letter so… go figure…

My final words – if you want to, or have to lose weight and you have never tried a meal replacement diet before, I think you should give it a go. With price starting at only £3.87 a day it should not break your budget and it may just work for you. Exante Diet is all natural – the meals do not contain any aspartame, no MSG, no trans fats and most important no GM ingredients, so at least you know that you are providing your body with good quality food. One thing I would recommend though is to try all the different flavours, as I am sure not all of them will be right for you… pick what you like and stick to it… If you decide to give it a go, please let me know how you doing… I would really want to hear your thoughts.

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I was provided with 21 meals free of charge for review purposes. All opinions expressed in this review are honest and my own.