Do you have a big event coming up and you want to drop weight quickly? Maybe you’re heading out on vacation, have a wedding coming up or just want to look good for the summer months. Today we will look at the Velocity Diet and see if it works for you.

Whatever it is, dropping weight fast is not always the easiest thing to do.

You need determination, mental willpower and the right diet and exercise program. If you fall into this category, the Velocity Diet directly markets itself to you. The Velocity Diet for all intent and purposes is a fad diet. It isn’t a sustainable way to live a healthy lifestyle.

However, with that said, can it help you drop the weight short term for whatever it is you’re planning on?

Possibly, but there are other conditions and aspects to the diet you need to be made aware of before starting the diet.

What Exactly is the Velocity Diet?

Exercise helps burn away calories, but realistically, unless you’re hitting the gym for hours a day, you probably only burn a few hundred calories working out every day.

For the long term, this is more than fine, as long as you combine it with a healthy, nutritious diet. Switching your diet is where cutting calories and rapped weight loss occurs. It is easier to cut out 1,000 calories from your diet than to exercise off 1,000 calories a day.

This is how the Velocity Diet wants to help you drop the pounds. 

The Velocity Diet is a 28-day diet. Over the course of the 28 days, you swap out meals for protein shakes. This kind of diet has been around for decades, as a liquid based diet is nothing new.

The company behind the shakes states these shakes are packed with more nutrients and protein than alternative options (more on this later), in order to keep you feeling full (or at least not hungry) longer. In order to offset the vitamins and minerals, you’ll miss out on while staying on the diet, the program pairs metabolic rate boosting supplements to assist.

This way, you not only receive the added nutrients required for a healthy life, but you’ll burn through more calories throughout the day as well (Livestrong, 2017).

Deciding Your Velocity Diet Plan

The Velocity Diet is a “customized” diet.

In other words, it allows you to determine a number of calories you wish to intake on a daily basis. By doing so, the number of shakes you consume is adjusted to meet these needs. The shakes you consume will serve as almost all of the calories you take over the course of the diet. Once a week, you are allowed to eat a single, solid meal.

What is a solid meal?

It is made up of natural, whole wheat grains and brown rice, vegetables, fish and possibly lean meat. The entire purpose of having a single meal like this once a week isn’t to give you added nutrients. It is instead to help cleanse your palette of, processed foods and keep your taste buds active for healthy foods.

By doing this, the Velocity Diet is also a cleansing diet as well. 

“Shake Diet Plan”

The shakes used within the Velocity Diet are not your average shakes.

So no, you can’t make your way to McDonald’s and pick up a strawberry shake on your way home from the gym. In fact, these shakes aren’t your average dietary shakes either. The shakes are made with a product called micellar casein.

This is a very slow digesting protein.

By slowly digesting the protein, the contents of the shake remains in your stomach longer, which helps prevent you from feeling hungry quickly. Based on the calorie intake levels you decide before starting the diet, you will drink anywhere from four to six shakes per day.

Outside of the protein, the shakes do come with an abundance of nutrients.

This includes fish oil, some carbs, flax seeds and healthy fats. In reality, the protein shakes are excellent at delivering the desired nutrients to the body while also giving you enough protein to continue working out and putting on some muscle at the gym. Now, you are not going to bulk up with this kind of a diet, so if this is your goal you’ll want to skip

Velocity. However, if you want to get more the shredded look and do anything form maintain to slightly build more muscle mass, Velocity might be able to help. 

Each protein shake is made up of around 40 grams of protein, two grams of fat and eight grams of carbs. As there are different protein flavors and options (in order to make it a little less bland) the exact makeup of the shakes would vary, but on average, these numbers are what to expect while on the diet.

What All Do You Receive?

The Velocity Diety isn’t something you just pick up a book about and then follow along.

It’s a diet you need to purchase all the products for. This is one of the latest trends in fad dieting. You can’t just “do” the diet. You have to purchase all the diet foods to perform the diet.

When you do buy into the diet, you receive the shakes. Beyond this though you’ll receive the Surge Recovery drink mix, which is designed for consuming post workout. You’ll get fat-loss capsules, fatty acid capsules, a superfood powder mix and an anabolic food additive.

All of these ingredients are used in your shakes. The shakes do not come premade and mixed. You have to do the mixing. Through exact instructions, you’ll have to measure out the amounts of each supplement in order to construct the shake.

You know when you go to the juice bar next to the gym following a workout and they have to toss in all sorts of odd powders and ingredients while whipping it up?

That’s more or less what you’ll be doing.

What Does a Typical Diet Plan Look Like?

The diet plan portion of Velocity Diet will vary only slightly between individuals, as one diet might have a shake or two more during the day. A standard day on the diet looks something like this:

-Breakfast consists of a shake, water, and the fatty acid supplement.

-Depending on diet plan, there may be a shake between breakfast and lunch

– Lunch consists of a protein shake, cold water, and the fatty acid supplement

– A mid-afternoon “snack” consists of a protein shake, cold water, and fatty acid supplement.

– Dinner consists of a protein shake, cold water, and fatty acid supplement. During the one meal a week where you eat a regular meal, it takes place at dinner.

-Exercise

-Following your exercise, you’ll consume a workout recovery drink. If the exercise takes place earlier in the day you’ll move the recovery drink to whenever you exercise.

How Many Calories a Day With The Velocity Diet?

Your body is able to shred the weight because the Velocity Diet is so constricting on the amount of calories you take in. The number of calories you consume on a daily basis will vary between workout days and non-workout days. On a workout day you’ll consume anywhere from 1,000 to 1,300 calories. However, on a non-workout day, you’ll consume 880 calories. The recommended number of calories is 2,000 per day, so on non-workout days you’re only consuming 40% of what is recommended (Healthline, 2017).

Who Makes Velocity Diet?

The Velocity Diet is designed by a company called Biotest. This is a supplement manufacturing company that sells everything from “pro-testosterone” supplements to creatine, protein and other workout supplements.

The Velocity Diet is a combination of many of its sold products, in addition to specially formulated shakes (which are not sold outside of the diet package).

As for the cost?

Well it isn’t going to be cheap. For the 28 days, Biotest advertises the diet at $439, which is rather steep for a single month. The company does offer sales, discounts and rebates, which can bring the price down closer to the $300-$350 mark, depending on when you purchase it and the available discount (Biotest, 2017). However, if you were assuming you’d save money over cooking food and preparing meals, you’d be incorrect.

What Kind of Negatives Are There?

The Velocity Diet is a water diet.

As 21 of the 22 meals (not including liquid snacks) are a beverage, this kind of diet is not sustainable long term. Biotest does not release numbers as to the number of individuals who complete the diet after starting, but as it cuts out food almost completely, it does have a higher abandon rate. If you do complete the 28 day diet, you’ll see a sizeable amount of weight loss. It is designed to help you cut the weight fast, which it delivers on.

However, there are also undesirable side effects to keep in mind. 

Whenever dealing with any kind of workout that allows you to drop more than two pounds a week, there are certain side effects you may experience. Velocity does provide added supplements and nutrients, in order to reduce the chance of these issues form occurring. With that said, diets that lead to rapid weight loss often bring about constipation, fatigue, gallstones, hair loss, heart problems and menstrual irregularities.

The diet doesn’t last all that long, so realistically these are not side effects you’ll run into.

Probably the biggest negative though is you’ll likely gain all of the weight back shortly thereafter completing the diet.

Once you move back to a solid diet, you’ll increase more calories. You’ll also have more sodium in the food, so your body will retain more water weight. This is a diet designed for prepping for an event or activity a month down the line. Outside of this, there really is no reason to even use the diet.

According to Coachmag (2017), there are solid results and yet also worrisome consequences. After about 2.5 weeks (none of the test subjects were able to make it the full four weeks, and the testers are all fitness enthusiasts, so that should say how difficult it is to make it the entire time), weight loss was around 7 pounds.

However, muscle mass increased due to the protein packed into each of the protein shakes. In fact, muscle mass increased by about a pound. Blood tests showed that while the metabolic rates were high (most likely due to the amount of caffeine placed in the fat burner supplements), the level of good cholesterol was at dangerously low levels, and these blood tests took place after about three weeks, not the full four.

Velocity Workouts

While the Velocity Diet is made up of the shakes, it does come with recommended workouts in order to maximize the amount of calories you burn.

It starts off recommending performing at least a half hour of “non-exercise” physical activity, such as walking the dog or a leisure bike ride. It is recommended to lift weights at least three times a week. If you are someone who likes to perform upper body on even days and lower body on odd days than you’ll want to hit the weights six days a week.

In terms of weight work, the Velocity Diet recommends performing five sets of five reps each of box squat, bench press, deadlift and overhead lift.

Added lifts it suggests you do includes six sets of 10 reps for the squat jump, single leg deadlift, hand walkout, push up clap, squat thrust, pike push up, star jumps and reverse lunge twist.

Conclusion

The Velocity Diet is a fad diet and one few actually make their way through.

It is an option for dropping weight quickly if you have a big event coming up, but it is also costly (especially if you don’t finish it). There are adverse side effects and you’ll be restricted to a nearly 100% liquid diet. With all of that said, it will help you drop the weight and put on muscle in a short period of time.

-Terry Asher