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The BEST Meal Delivery Services for Weight Loss

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Inside: Find out which are the best meal delivery services for weight loss (both cook at home and ready to eat meals are covered). With options like clean eating, vegan, paleo and keto you are bound to find one that works for you. I use these in conjunction with my favorite weight loss app. Affiliate links to some of my favorites are used in this post.

You see them everywhere lately. Flyers in the mail, TV commercials, facebook ads, newspaper articles, blogs. Meal Delivery Services are out in full force.

But what they heck are they? And are there any specifically geared towards weight loss? I cover that all below.

How Meal Delivery Services Work

If you have never tried home delivery meals before, what happens is you log onto the company's website, select your plan (how many meals a week you want to receive, and how many servings you want in each meal) and then you select the meals for your first week from the choices offered.

Your ingredients are shipped to you, pre-measured and ready to cook.

You pop everything into the fridge, and when you're ready to cook you grab your recipe, ingredients and tools and get started.

Oh! The recipe cards! So each box will also include one recipe card for each meal. If you have ever cooked a meal with more than one component, only to have one part done way early, while the other part takes forever, you will appreciate this method of cooking. The recipes take you step by step through the whole meal, rather than having separate recipes for the main entree and one for the side, etc.

We started using a meal delivery service because my husband has more…particular tastes than I do (I will eat just about anything).

I'd spend hours scouring pinterest and google for recipes that met everyone's taste preferences, and was still quick and easy enough for me to do in the midst of our busy lives. Half the time one of the recipes would be rejected outright by hubby or one of the kids. It was exhausting and I didn't have hours to waste.

So we'd end up ordering out a lot, which is awful when you're trying to reach health and fitness goals.

So we tried a meal delivery kit and here's what happened.

Now, hubby selects our meals from the meal delivery service app (according to his “preferences”) for a whole week in a few quick clicks. I cook them and we all live happily ever after.

This means neither of us have to spend time searching our cookbooks, memories, sale papers or the internet for ideas or recipes.

When I started a new weight loss plan back in September, I was worried about how I could possibly continue with our meal delivery service and still stick to my weight loss plan.

Using Meal Delivery Kits for Weight Loss

In the end I found that meal delivery services actually fit hand-in-hand perfectly with a weight loss program for several reasons:

  • Saves time searching for recipes that made everyone happy
  • Meets dietary needs.
  • Keeps you from ordering out, which is a total diet-buster.
  • Makes you more confident in the kitchen. (For example, after using them for a few months, now I love to just pop seasoned veggies in the oven, or sauté something healthy for myself, when before I thought it was too much time and effort.)
  • Teaches you tons of kitchen skills and gives you a lot of practice within the repeated framework of the master recipe cards.

Okay now you know why they are perfect to use on any diet. Below are the two different strategies to use to make meal delivery services work within a weight loss plan.

RELATED: Get a 30 Day Free Trial of Noom Weight Loss App

The Best Meal Delivery Services for Weight Loss

Strategy #1: Losing weight using a Meal Delivery Service that focuses on weight loss. 

The main strategy people use to lose weight using meal delivery services is to subscribe to a meal delivery service whose main focus IS to provide meals for weight loss or healthy eating.

I am not talking about freezer meal weight loss companies like Nutrisystem. They might be a great solution for some people but we tried it years ago and they were not for us.

These meal delivery kit companies deliver fresh ingredients or freshly prepared foods that are all calorie conscious or focused on a certain diet.

To lose weight with these services, just reverse engineer your day. In other words log your food ahead of time. Look at what the calorie count is for the dinner, and log it in your weight loss or calorie counter app in the morning, then plan breakfast, lunch and snacks to fit within the remaining calories.

If you are looking for weight loss meal delivery services that send fresh, uncooked food for you to cook, there are several to choose from. You could call them meal prep delivery services since they do a lot of the prep for you. Check out these options and the variety of meal delivery plans they offer:

  • My first choice for a healthy meal delivery kit would be Sun Basket. You can use my link to Get their current Best Offer. The promo code is built right in. Not only are they specifically geared towards weight loss and a healthy lifestyle, but they focus on sustainable practices as well. My 6 foot 2 husband and I gave it a try. Here is my full, honest Sun Basket Review. They also offer Vegetarian, Vegan, Pescatarian, Paleo and more options.  
  • Splendid Spoon is an awesome option for adding more fruits and veggies to your existing diet. This has been great to balance out the fast food that my hubby orders from time to time. I love having the fruit smoothies for breakfast and adding the veggie and grain bowls to my plate for lunches and dinners.
  • Blue Apron recently added a Wellness option to offer a select number of diet delivery meals, as well as Beyond Burgers (with a whopping 20g of plant-based protein). Between the Wellness menu, 500 calories or less options, vegetarian or carb conscious, there are some really healthy options. Get the BEST available Blue Apron Deal Here.
  • Green Chef is not usually on people's radar but they do an awesome job at offering healthy, nutritious meals to cook at home. They have quick and easy options too. When you click my Green Chef Link, the current deal pops up across the top of the page, so no promo code needed!

I have tried all of the above and my favorite was Sun Basket (see my Sun Basket Review for everything that sets it apart) but none of them were bad.

If you are looking for pre-made meal delivery options, or ready-to-eat weight loss meals, but want to steer clear of store-bought freezer meals, check out these options:

  • HungryRoot is a pretty cool service that offers a unique mix of fresh, prepped, pre-cooked and mix-and-match ingredients that you can grab and go any time. You can eat them as is, or put a couple together in under 10 minutes for a healthy meal.
  • Trifecta offers fresh, pre-cooked meals featuring premium, organic food delivery. You can choose between their prepared meals OR a la carte options if you want to order just a certain protein for example. They offer Paleo, Keto, Clean Eating, Vegan and Vegetarian options. Check out the Trifecta meals which are available in weekly packs or a la carte options. They have a huge variety for healthy, prepared meals delivered.
  • Diet To Go, which offers chef-prepared healthy meals with foodie level flavors as part of their Balanced, Keto, Vegetarian and Balanced Diabetes menu options. My friend Georgina at Step Away From the Carbs recently did a review of Diet to Go's Low Carb Meal Delivery Meals.
  • Personal Chef to Go

Keep reading below for strategy #2!

Using a Regular Meal Delivery Service for Weight Loss

The other option for losing weight with a meal delivery service is by using a standard one (ie. not weight loss specific).

We have kind of bounced from one meal delivery service to the next, trying to find the best fit for us. Your needs may be different from ours, so by no means am I saying, “My way or the highway!” But this has been what worked for us.

Here is a run down of the top meal delivery services for this type of lifestyle:

  • Blue Apron – Blue Apron was the first meal kit we tried. We really loved the fresh ingredients and elevated flavors that were a step above your typical meatloaf and potatoes. These are probably the closest to restaurant quality and often featured interesting ingredients that we'd never used before.
  • HomeChef – We have a lot of friends who love Home Chef for the exact opposite reason- it's all really familiar, mom's classic recipe type stuff…like meatloaf and mashed potatoes! We recently tried HomeChef and I found that it was the simplest of the ones we have tried so far. Very fresh ingredients, cooked very simply. It reminded me of Claire Robinson's Five Ingredient Fix. While any meal kit would be great for beginners, Home Chef stood out as great for anyone not super confident in the kitchen.
  • Hello Fresh – Hello Fresh is a great balance between the fancy flavors and comfort classics. Use my link to get the best offer available from Hello Fresh!

The one thing that all of the above plans have in common is that their meals are NOT all focused on weight loss.

Weight Loss Strategy #2: Losing weight with a standard meal delivery service:

The strategy I use with these dinners is incredibly simple.

Each recipe card shows you the calories per dinner serving, so I use that to plan my meals.

I generally rotate some of the same breakfasts and lunches by week, over and over, because I like them, I know they fit with my weight loss goals and they are easy.

So, I eat my normal breakfast, lunch and snacks throughout the day, log them and then I look at the calorie count for tonight's dinner.

If it fits with my calorie budget, then I just go on and eat the whole serving.

If it is more than the calories I have budgeted for my dinner, based on my weight loss coach app, I plate a portion of my serving onto my dinner plate and I put the remainder of my portion directly into one of our favorite glass storage containers.

Depending on the number of calories, I eat the leftovers for 1 or 2 lunches, or sometimes I just save them for the kids because I know they will love them.

If you're the only one in your family trying to lose weight, then choosing one of these makes sense. LalyDad walks a couple miles each day to and from the train, and he is 6 foot 2, so his calorie needs are higher than mine, so we usually use Plated or HomeChef.

If we were both looking to cut calories, I would go with one of the options in strategy #1.

Weight Loss Program With Menus to Follow

If you like doing your own shopping and cooking, but want to follow meal plans and exercise plan that is spelled out for you, check out this weight loss app. (There's even a free 7 day trial!).

PlateJoy is another option if you want to do your own shopping, it is a meal planning app that is extremely customizable based on your diet, the number of people in your family, ingredients to avoid, etc. They also recently added Instant Pot Recipes.

Get a nice discount at PlateJoy by using my code lalymom10!

Well there you have simple strategies using Meal Delivery Services for weight loss. Have you found one that I missed? Let's hear about it below!

the BEST meal delivery services for weight loss - cook at home meals and premade diet meal options. #weightloss #dinner #mealprep #dietfriendly #keto #vegetarian #cleaneating

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