From shoe sales to secrets, we girlfriends love to share with each other. And one of the things we definitely love sharing is any secret to being healthy and fit. Thankfully we have the Faux Diet Queen to share her girlfriend advice on getting fit and losing weight.

The Faux Diet Queen (or as we affectionately call her, FDQ) has agreed to share her latest (and last) weight loss journey with us as a regular feature at Girlfriendology. We hope you’ll join us to cheer her on, nudge her back on track when she strays, and generally giggle along.

I look at each new diet as an adventure. Like Ponce de Leon, I am convinced that each plan, each regimen, each approach will bring me one step closer to being thin and looking younger. Unlike good ol’ Ponce, I’ll settle for shedding some unwanted poundage and looking my age.

So how happy was I when my girlfriend offered to let me try the Shaklee Cinch program for a month. Whoo hoo!

Here’s the idea with Cinch.

1. You get a big box delivered right to your door. I love packages, don’t you? Especially the ones that contain food. No shopping, no parking spaces, no eating an entire day’s worth of calories from the try-its placed strategically around the grocery store. Opening the box is fun too—an un-birthday present that no one else in the house is allowed to touch.

2. You use the Cinch products for breakfast, lunch, and snack and provide your own dinner. One of the challenges I have with most diets is not wanting to eat differently than the rest of the family at dinner, so this sounded pretty good to me.

3. You lose weight. I am on this. The Cinch program provides an instant tea. Actually it’s called Pomegranate Energy Tea Mix, which you pour into water, mix, and slurp. (Slurping is optional.) Cinch recommends you have the tea mid-morning. Which is a fine thing mid-morning, but left me un-caffeinated while I made my breakfast shake … have I mentioned I hate cleaning the kitchen before I go to work? The tea was ok by itself, but much better with some sweetener in it. It would probably be quite nice with a bagel, but there weren’t any bagels in the box. You make the shakes by mixing the protein powder with skim milk and “shaking like you mean it.” It probably would have been easier if I used the blender, but then I’d have had to clean the blender and I’m in an anti-cleaning mode at the moment. So I simply poured milk into a measuring cup, got out a whisk, and whisked like I meant it. I generally added sweetener and cinnamon too. Yum!

The shake mixes come in vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, and latte. All I can say is that whoever thought that sending only two servings of the latte flavor was appropriate made a Big Mistake. It was my fav.

The program provides meal replacement bars (much easier to tote around on those days when refrigeration isn’t handy) flavored in blueberry and peanut butter. Meal replacement bars are good sized bars.

The snack bars, on the other hand, are small. Shockingly small. Microscopically, shockingly small. But, like jewelry, good things can come in small packages. Tiny those snack bars might be, but they were quite filling and satisfying. Three flavors come in the box: chocolate, peanut butter, and lemon cranberry. BFF was trying the Cinch program at the same time I was and I convinced her to trade flavors of snack bar. I leave it to you to figure out which ones I scurried off with.

On the Cinch plan, you drink a lot of water. A LOT of water. In fact, I highly recommend investing in high quality toilet paper, because you will be visiting the restroom more than you might be used to. The plan also has a 3 in 1 boost pill you’re supposed to take at each meal. They definitely help you feel full and presumably help you lose weight if you remember to take them. IF you remember to take them, heavy emphasis on the IF. In the Faux Diet Queen world, pills are not a food and therefore not easy to remember.

My Not-Even-Close-to-Humble Opinion I have to say, I really liked the regimentation of the Cinch plan. There was virtually no thinking involved for two-thirds of the day (those of you about to say that there is virtually no thinking in my world the entire day can just go mind your own business thank you very much). I tend to get hungry around 11am, and I found it easy to tell myself I couldn’t have anything to eat until lunch. I liked the flavors of the shakes and the bars for the most part. I also really liked that I didn’t have to go shopping for weird foods that can only be bought in inconvenient quantities.

What I didn’t like was going from the structure of having two meals and a snack carefully planned out to wild freedom of dinner. Oh, the plan sent along guidelines. But since the rest of the day didn’t require paying attention to guidelines, I found myself snarfing everything in sight (and several things I had to hunt down) for dinner. I also found it harder to stay on plan (and to drink my daily ocean of water) on the weekends.

Cinch sent along a food tracker. I truly believe I would have been even more successful if I’d used it. It just seemed so silly to use it to track the snack bar, y’know? And somehow, by dinnertime, the idea of starting tracking my food for the day seemed, well…I never used it.

Did I lose weight? I most certainly did. I lost 3.5 pounds in three weeks. Which I think is pretty darn good. And when you take into account the FDQ philosophy that More Is More (meaning that there were days when I ate two snack bars, and…well, never mind the “and”), I can honestly say the program was a success.

The Faux Diet Queen is a girlfriend and a half trying to find her skinny self. She is currently three and a half pounds closer to her goals. Girlfriendology was compensated for this particular blog and the Cinch program was provided gratis-for-free-without-cost to the FDQ.
Girlfriend notes: The standard Cinch shake is soy-based, but there is a whey-based formulation. The bars either contain peanuts or are made on machines that just finished making bars with peanuts. So if you have allergies, order carefully.

Girlfriendology / Debba here: We love our girlfriends no matter what size jeans they wear or what the scales tell them if they’re brave enough to get on them. (Something I personally avoid like the plague.) But, we also want our girlfriends to be around and healthy for a long time. We’re sharing this journey that our girlfriend, FDQ (the FAB Faux Diet Queen) because it’s what girlfriends do – we go through life and diet together (and shoe shopping, and highs and lows …). Join us on her journey to fitness and good health. We’re excited for her to motivate and inspire us all!

Here’s some more Faux Diet Queen ‘adventures’. Stop back next Friday for the next installment!

• I am Ashamed of Myself | Confession and Resolve
• Food Beliefs I Have to Ditch Part II – More Food Baggage
• Year End Interview — Girlfriendology Talks to the Faux Diet Queen
• Diet Re-Launch for the New Year
• ‘Tis the Night Before New Year — A Story
• Water, water everywhere – Pass the Chardonnay
• The Faux Diet Queen Talks Turkey / Thanksgiving
• Beliefs I need to Ditch – Food Baggage
• Meet the Faux Diet Queen
• I Hate the Scale and the Scale Hates Me
• The FDQ Faces the Great Cookie Onslaught–Advice Needed!
• Food Pushers and Food Police

p.s. If your food stories fall into a more serious topic, like emotional eating, we’ve got a great girlfriend for you to meet too – ELLEN SHUMAN. She’s shared great advice on emotional eating on various guest blogs and podcasts. (Her podcast on emotional eating is our #1 listened to interview so lots of us have some emotional eating issues or friends/family who do.)

Tags: #FDQ, cinch, diet, Faux Diet Queen, girlfriend advice, healthy, lose weight, Shaklee

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2012 at 9:41 am and is filed under Health and Fitness, Product Reviews, Shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.