As a rule, behavioral habits lead to the appearance and maintenance of excess weight in initially healthy people. First of all, these include physical inactivity (sedentary lifestyle) and overeating. The process of increasing body weight progresses especially rapidly when these behavioral habits go together with each other with regular consumption of food with a reduced amount of the protein component. 

Physiological processes quickly become pathological, triggering the development of a whole cascade of metabolic disorders, up to the onset of such diseases as type 2 diabetes mellitus, obesity, hypogonadism (testosterone deficiency in men and women), cardiovascular diseases and many others.

The more pronounced the degree of obesity in a person, the less strength and ability he has to maintain physical activity. At the same time, the less he moves, the less likely he is to reduce the absolute and relative amount of adipose tissue. And so a vicious circle is formed, from which it becomes more difficult to break out every day.

Being overweight has many negative consequences – from aesthetic and psychological to irreversible health effects. Outward unattractiveness, domestic discrimination, deterioration in the quality of everyday life, occupational restrictions, an increased risk of strokes, heart attacks and diabetes are all the result of overweight.

However, many people cannot solve the problem of excess weight, despite the sincere desire and objective awareness of the ongoing deterioration. First of all, the majority lacks the willpower to maintain a negative energy balance in the body, that is, to follow a low-calorie diet. Few people are able to systematically endure the feeling of hunger, especially if neither a week nor a month later the mirror and scales show an obvious result. 

However, even the most difficult situations are rarely hopeless. In this case, we are talking about a high-protein diet. In order not to reduce the diet to poultry meat, low-fat cottage cheese and not technically complicate the already stressful standard of living by the need to cook and carry food, those wishing to reduce body weight can include protein substitutes in the low-calorie (1500 kcal / day) diet. … This food not only has good organoleptic properties (tasty), but is also very convenient and easy to use in an office, apartment and even transport. In this case, the first visible results (up to minus 4 kilograms) appear after two weeks. This was proved by the results of clinical studies of the Herbalife body weight loss program carried out at the Nutrition Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. Inspired by the first successes, in two months the patients achieved even more significant results: a decrease in body weight by 6.9 kg, hip volume by 4.5 cm, waist volume by 5.1 cm. At the same time, the risks associated with obesity, including abdominal obesity. 

In principle, in this case, weight loss is due to fat, and not muscles, which is the most physiological and difficult to achieve without the use of functional nutrition. The maintenance of muscle mass is guaranteed by an adequate amount of protein in the diet and a balance of essential macronutrients. This combination, moreover, relieves the debilitating feeling of hunger, which is compared to the “wolf” and which may not leave a person even in a dream, forming one of the components of chronic stress. This exhausting feeling is common in most hypocaloric diets. Having got rid of the feeling of hunger, overweight patients are more likely to follow the recommendations of the nutritionist and carry out the planned plan. 

Protein meal replacements for weight correction open up new perspectives in the fight against overweight, a problem that is becoming more acute both in Russia and around the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), obesity is recognized as an epidemic of the 21st century and in light of such an urgent global problem, the practical introduction of protein food substitutes can and should change the attitude towards diets as such and improve the quality of life of patients, saving them from the development of serious diseases and prolonging life to them.