Prepared Diet Meals Delivered to Your Home: NutriSystems, The Zone, Atkins

We all want to look and feel good? However, for many busy professionals, having the time to ferret out healthy food products is unlikely, while having the time to actually cook low calorie, healthy meals using fresh food on a daily basis is something that is simply not going to happen in this lifetime.

One solution is to retain a personal chef. According to a recent press release from the American Personal Chef Institute, 70,000 Americans are already doing just that. The cost, however, is prohibitive for any but the very affluent.

Diet delivery services are more affordable, but still are as much or more than what it cost to eat out every meal of the day. However, a diet delivery service may be your best option if you have particular dietary needs beyond simply needing something that is nutritious but low-calorie; diabetics and those with food allergies would fall into this category.

Prepared meals that follow established weight loss programs are increasingly popular. The most popular of these are Atkins at Home, NutriSystem, and Zone Diet at Home.

Atkins at Home is a trademarked program licensed by Atkins Nutritionals, the company founded to promote the low-carb diet made popular by the late Dr. Robert Atkins in his 1972 book Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution and based on a diet originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Atkins Nutritionals filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2005 as the low-carb craze fell out of favor, but popular demand from true believers brought the company back to life a year later. Atkins at Home delivers a week?s worth of meals at a time and the meals are not frozen, only requiring refridgeration as long as they are consumed within the allotted 7 day time period.

NutriSystem is the original prepared meal diet plan and the most heavily marketed, using an array of celebrities who use the diet. The NutriSystem Diet is uses the glycemic index as the basis for its small-portion prepared meals combined with a mild exercise regime. The company started as a provider of liquid meal replacement drinks. That approach was abandoned in 1978. The prepared meal approach was combined with weight loss centers, but the low-carb craze stole away too many customers and the firm went bankrupt in the early Nineties. In 1999 NutriSystem returned with an Internet-based advisory structure combined with home delivery of prepared meals, similar to the Atkins at Home approach.

The Zone Diet is a low-carb diet developed by bio-chemist Barry Sears and popularized in his 1995 book The Zone: A Dietary Road Map. The diet is less restrictive that the Atkin's low-carb diet and focuses on a more balanced nutritional approach. Zone Diet at Home was launched in 2004 by parent company, ZoneChefs, a diet delivery service serving New York and Los Angeles. There seems to be no licensing of the original Sears program involved and prepared diet delivery services that follow The Zone diet have appeared in a number of other major cities. 

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