Countless diet plans essentially promise a new you with a new body and a new mindset about food. Optavia offers them in an attractive package that includes coaches, community, plans and products. But is Optavia safe? Let’s take a look.
What is Optavia?
Optavia Diet is an updated version of Medifast. If you remember, Medifast is a weight loss company that uses multi-level marketing and franchised weight loss clinics to sell its branded weight loss and health products. The main difference between Medifast and Optavia is that the new products are now made without artificial sweeteners, colors or flavors.
Optavia is a meal replacement diet consisting of very low calorie products. It is designed for rapid weight loss and is marketed as a total transformation with community support, 1:1 coaching and food (their packaged products).
How Optavia works
To lose weight, a person must burn more calories than they consume. With all the weight loss programs out there today, it’s easy for consumers looking to lose weight to get lured in by something that sounds promising.
Optavia offers a tempting solution. While it claims to help take the guesswork out of weight loss, it simply creates a large calorie deficit using its meal replacements. These are called Fuelings, which include over 60 prepackaged, processed foods and calorie-controlled meals marketed as “nutritionally interchangeable, scientifically engineered, delicious and convenient.”
To get started, you choose from three programs:
Optimum Weight 5 & 1 Plan: This plan is based on eating six small meals a day. It claims to move your body into a “gentle but effective fat-burning state while maintaining lean muscle mass.” This plan includes 5 fuel and 1 lean and green meal.
4 & 2 & 1 Optimal Weight Plan: This is for people who don’t want to cut out food groups and prefer a flexible meal plan. Uses 4 Optavia fuels, 2 lean and green meals and 1 snack.
3 & 3 Best Health Plan: This plan claims to be nutritionally balanced, easy to follow and consists of 3 meals and 3 Optavia Fuelings per day, consumed every 2-3 hours. For this plan, users are instructed to determine their total energy expenditure using the calculator on the Optavia website and select the meal plan associated with that figure.
Every Optavia plan incorporates the transformative health habits system with the tagline, “Lifetime Transformation, One Healthy Habit at a Time®.” Habits focus on weight, food and hydration, movement, sleep, mind and environment.
In addition to Optavia plans and products, users receive support from coaches, 90% of whom are previous Optavia users — not dietitians or health professionals. This is a multi-level marketing structure. Previous users become “coaches” to then make a commission on sales for members or customers who sign up for programs under them. They offer “1:1 coaching”, most often without credentials.
What you can and cannot eat
Following the Optavia diet involves eating a combination of pre-packaged and pre-measured fuels, lean and green meals and snacks.
The idea of having someone else determine your food choices for you may sound appealing. But when you look more closely at the ingredients in Optavia products, you can see that they have little to offer for your health.
For example, this is its ingredient list a Optavia Cranberry Honey Granola Bar 100 Calories: Soy Protein Isolate, Soluble Corn Fiber, Brown Rice Syrup, Peanuts, Sugar, Golden Raisins (with sulfur dioxide to protect color), Polydextrose, Milk Protein Isolate, Rolled Oats, Erythritol, Allyl Syrup, Almonds, Water, Natural Flavors, contains 2% or less glycerin, vegetable oil (canola, sunflower and/or soybean oil), cranberry, guar gum, rice starch, soy lecithin, salt, honey, maltodextrin, peanut oil, citric acid, potato starch, steviol glycosides, xanthan gum, Bacillus coagulans GBI-30 6086.
In other words, it’s a bunch of highly processed ingredients with a probiotic thrown in at the end. In addition, these bars are fortified with 25 vitamins and minerals to compensate for the lack of whole and minimally processed foods you eat on the Optavia weight loss program. This is typical of a fad diet program – junky products designed to promote weight loss but not actually promote health, with temporary results that often only last as long as you stick to their plan.
There are no specific foods on the red list. However, the program strongly discourages the consumption of sweets and sweets, although fruit and flavored yogurt can be added back after the initial weight loss phase. Optavia discourages consumption of butter, high-sugar/high-fat condiments such as mayonnaise, barbecue sauce and ketchup, alcohol and sugary drinks such as soda and sweetened coffee drinks.
Remember that while programs like this can cut down on your meal planning and preparation, they come at a cost. For Optavia, that can be several hundred dollars a month. More than that, following this program can even cost your health.
Is Optavia safe?
The benefit of Optavia is rapid weight loss. This is to be expected given the very low calorie, portion controlled, prepackaged meal replacement nature of this program. For example, the 5 & 1 plan comes to 800-1,000 calories per day, which is extremely low. Other plans go over 1,000-2,000 which is still very low especially for active people.
Protein is also very low in this program for athletes. For example, protein will only add up to about 1g/kg for a 220kg person, not nearly enough to build muscle during weight loss.
For overweight or obese people, weight loss can provide benefits such as improved blood sugar control, blood pressure and inflammation. However, weight loss from these types of programs is rarely sustainable. Most people don’t find that eating this way is something they want to do forever. Not to mention, many Optavia Fuelings are highly processed foods, as expected of prepackaged food items. This makes it difficult to transition to weight maintenance after reaching your goal, as you have no real training on how or what to eat without the prepackaged foods.
Finally, there is a potential danger. These types of very low calorie diets carry a risk of developing nutrient deficiencies the longer one is on one. Optavia’s plans limit entire food groups, including fruits, vegetables and whole grains – which are some of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet.
Optavia litigation and complaints
A federal class-action lawsuit was filed against Optavia and its parent company, Medifast, in 2022.
The complaint says that: “Defendants use obscuring patterns to enroll consumers in an auto-renewal program called ‘Optavia Premier.'” This refers to illegal tactics companies use to deceive users by manipulating them with obscuring interface designs , subvert or damage the decision- they make around their purchasing choices.
There is also one Better Business Bureau file for Optavia, which is not a BBB accredited company. It has a consumer rating of 1.5 out of 5 stars and nearly 500 Optavia complaints — largely about customer service and the inability to cancel or receive refunds.
Do I recommend Optavia?
No, I’m not recommending Optavia and I’m not alone. This program has received very poor reviews across the board from many health and nutrition professionals.
In addition to the many downfalls above, including potentially harming your health, this type of diet will not support your physical or mental performance. Cutting calories and losing weight quickly can reduce body mass, but at the cost of low energy, fatigue, irritability, and the many other symptoms that come from a lack of fuel. Adequate nutrition and calories are critical to a healthy, active lifestyle.
And while community support can be a game changer, remember that Optavia coaches are not health professionals, nor are they trained in nutrition. They are regular people who have used Optavia and get paid to promote it and make it work for others.
Instead of investing in Optavia and similar programs, work with a registered dietitian knows effective, sustainable nutritional changes to achieve body composition goals.
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