The Mayo Clinic Diet Review

UPDATED March 11. 2024.
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The Mayo Clinic Diet is a weight loss program created by the world-renowned Mayo Clinic, a leader in the field of medical care, research, and education. It is a safe, effective, doctor-designed weight loss solution that can help you break bad habits and form new, healthy ones that can allow you not only to reach your goal weight but also adopt a healthier lifestyle. Find out how this unique diet works and whether it can work for you in this objective The Mayo Clinic Diet review.

How The Mayo Clinic Diet Works

The Mayo Clinic Diet is a subscription-based service that allows you to lose weight by following its fully personalized online weight loss program. The service does not provide meals. Instead, it offers custom meal plans, recipes, tools, trackers, tips, and guides, all available online as a part of the service.

Your journey with The Mayo Clinic Diet starts with a free diet profile. While creating the profile, you get to describe your eating and activity habits, assess your knowledge on healthy eating practices, and determine how easy or hard it would be for you to follow The Mayo Clinic Diet guidelines.

These guidelines include eating a healthy breakfast, introducing more fruit and veggies into your diet, avoiding processed foods, limiting your intake of sweets and beverages, sticking to whole grains and healthy fats, and engaging in moderate physical activity for at least 30 minutes per day. You are also asked to identify the main obstacle standing between you and your ideal shape.

The Mayo Clinic Diet how work

Based on your answers, the service creates your unique diet profile and determines which healthy habits you need to form in order to reach your goal weight. Once your profile is complete, you can get started with the program, which comprises 2 phases: Lose It! and Live It!

In the Lose It! phase, your daily calorie intake is reduced to between 1,200 and 1,800 calories, depending on your needs and goals. The phase lasts for 2 weeks, focuses on 15 key habits that the Mayo Clinic experts deem essential to weight loss, and allows for accelerated weight loss. You can expect to lose 6 to 10 pounds during this phase. This is the hardest part of the process, but it only lasts for 2 weeks and you get handy tools that can help you stay on track.

In the Live it! phase, your daily calorie intake is reduced by 500 to 1,000 calories in comparison to your usual calorie intake. You keep on losing weight steadily, so you can expect to shed 1 to 2 pounds per week. This phase is easier and allows for greater flexibility. It lasts until you reach your goal weight, after which you get expert guidelines that can help you maintain your weight and stay fit forever.

What Makes The Mayo Clinic Diet Different

The Mayo Clinic Diet is a healthy weight loss solution created by medical experts and designed to be the only diet you will ever need. Unlike most diets, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It is a personalized program designed in accordance with your eating and activity habits, dietary needs, and weight loss goals. It is your personal weight loss assistant that can help you shed extra pounds fast, steadily progress toward your goal weight, and stay healthy and fit for good. It is not a fad but a lifestyle guide, which makes it different from the majority of diets available.

Its dietary guidelines are based on the unique, expert-made Mayo Clinic Healthy Weight Pyramid. This pyramid is designed as a guide that can help you make good food choices and determine adequate portion sizes based on your daily calorie goals. In general, it recommends consuming at least 3 portions of fruit, at least 4 portions of vegetables, 4-5 servings of carbs, 3-4 servings of protein, and 3 servings of fat per day. Further, it recommends consuming no more than 75 calories of sweets or beverages per day. By following these guidelines, you get to lose weight while maintaining a well-balanced diet.

In addition to healthy eating guidelines, the service provides plenty of additional resources that make dieting easier and allow you to monitor your progress, stay motivated, and get expert help whenever you need it. Instead of offering ready-meals, this service provides everything you need to eat and exercise properly, transform your body, change your habits, and become a slimmer, healthier version of yourself.

Meals And Recipes

We mentioned before in this The Mayo Clinic Diet review that this service does not provide any meals. Thus, in this section, we will explore what it is exactly that this service provides.

First, you get a personalized meal plan designed in accordance with the Mayo Clinic Healthy Weight Pyramid, your weight loss goals, and your dietary requirements. It can be adjusted to suit special diets, like the vegetarian, heart-healthy or low-glycemic diets. However, you need to eat plenty of fruit, veggies, and whole grains, so if there is a reason why you cannot eat these foods, this diet is not for you. If you have a medical condition, like diabetes, you should talk to your doctor before getting started.

The Mayo Clinic Diet meal plan

Second, you gain access to hundreds of quick and simple recipes. You get recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You can expect quite delicious dishes, like rancher’s eggs or banana oatmeal hotcakes for breakfast, black bean burgers for lunch, and gorgeous scallops with potatoes and greens for dinner.

Further, you get portion-size guides that are determined based on your current weight, goal weight, and daily calorie goal. Your calorie goal depends on your weight. For example, women who are just getting started with the Lose It! phase should consume 1,200 calories per day if they weigh 250 lbs. or less while men who weight 250 lbs. or less should start with 1,400 calories per day. The guidelines are concrete and easy to follow.

In addition to dietary resources, you get exercise guides to complement your new diet and maximize your weight loss results. These include personalized workouts, walking and running guides, and fitness tips that suit your personal fitness level.

Finally, in order to make it easier to stick to your decision to lose weight and stay motivated, The Mayo Clinic Diet provides helpful tools. These include the Habit Tracker, which encourages you to perform as many of the recommended habits as possible every day, the Fitness Planner, which helps you structure your exercises, the Food & Fitness Journal to keep track of your progress, the self-explanatory Weight, Inch, and Nutrient Tracker, and The Mayo Clinic Diet app, which allows you to get help from the experts at any time.

The Mayo Clinic Diet meals plan

Pricing

The Mayo Clinic Diet subscription costs only $5 per week. However, it is important to note that the subscription fee is charged quarterly. Therefore, you pay $65 every quarter. You can cancel your subscription at any time, but keep in mind that you are charged for every quarter in advance. By canceling, you are preventing further renewals of your subscription.

Delivery Areas

As stated previously in this The Mayo Clinic Diet review, this service does not provide any physical goods. It exclusively provides online materials and apps. Thus, you can become a subscriber regardless of where you live.

The Mayo Clinic Diet Pros And Cons

To make sure The Mayo Clinic Diet meets all your standards and expectations, it is important to know its biggest advantages and disadvantages. With a short overview of its pros and cons, you can easily decide if The Mayo Clinic Diet is the right company for you.

Pros
  • Doctor-designed weight loss program
  • Completely personalized meal plans
  • Hundreds of easy recipes
  • Helpful weight loss tools and trackers
  • Affordable subscription

Cons

  • Does not provide meals
  • Charged quarterly

Bottom Line

Finishing off this Mayo Clinic Diet review, we can conclude that this weight loss program has numerous advantages, the most important of which is the fact that it is designed by medical experts. It offers custom instead of one-size-fits-all solutions and it provides all the resources you may need to start losing weight, stay on track, and maintain your weight once you reach your goals. Its guidelines are concrete, which makes it rather easy to follow.

While we prefer weight loss programs that provide meals in addition to guides and tools, The Mayo Clinic Diet is still an excellent program that may be an even better fit for dieters who value flexibility and prefer making their meals themselves.


The Mayo Clinic Diet FAQ

What is the Mayo Clinic Diet menu?

The Mayo Clinic Diet offers fully personalized online diet menus based on the Mayo Clinic Healthy Weight Pyramid and designed in accordance with your weight loss goals and dietary requirements. All dieters gain access to hundreds of approved recipes.

Does the Mayo Clinic Diet work?

When followed properly, the Mayo Clinic Diet program is a highly effective weight loss solution that can help you lose up to 10 pounds during the first 2 weeks. Afterwards, you can expect to lose 1-2 pounds per week until you reach your goal weight.

Is the Mayo Clinic Diet subscription free of charge?

The Mayo Clinic Diet subscription costs $65 per quarter, which amounts to $5 per week. You are charged for every quarter in advance and you can cancel your subscription anytime.

How can I cancel the Mayo Clinic Diet subscription?

To cancel your subscription, you should contact the company via email or by phone.

What do you eat on the Mayo Clinic Diet?

As a subscriber, you receive a custom-designed meal plan that suits your needs. In general, you get to eat plenty of fruit and veg, healthy fats, and whole grains and you need to avoid processed foods and sweets.

How much weight can you lose on the Mayo Clinic Diet?

During the first 2-week phase, you can expect to lose up to 6 to 10 pounds. The second phase, which lasts until you achieve your goal, allows you to lose weight slowly but steadily, with the average weight loss of up to 2 pounds per week.

View All FAQs

User Reviews (7)

The Mayo Clinic Diet is rated 4/5, based on 7 user reviews.

The The Mayo Clinic Diet reviews listed below reflect the opinions and experiences of real users and are in no way influenced by the service reviewed here. Before publishing each review, our team checks whether it was submitted by an actual user in an effort to prevent false or spammy reviews.

  1. | March 8, 2020

    The only thing I don’t like about this program is that it recommends I have to exercise every day 😀 I would much rather that I just do what it says and the pounds just magically disappear. But seriously, it’s a well thought of program, I just wish that they offer meal substitutes so I don’t have to cook every day.

  2. | September 24, 2019

    Tried it and I could have done it myself with the help of any health food website, there’s nothing special aboutmy diet plan, only the same old same old I’ve heard before!

  3. | April 4, 2019

    Everything is customized here and I love it! It normal that something that works for you doesn’t for someone else and you get frustrated when you don’t see results.

  4. | January 18, 2019

    I never thought diets are useful because as soon as you are finished you just go back to the way you were before you have started. The Mayo clinic is different because it makes you change your eating habits completely so there’s no chance you are going to go back to your original weight.

  5. | November 24, 2018

    One of the diets that actually work and don’t make it overly difficult to stick to it. I’ve lost more than 20 pounds in just two months with minimal cravings compared to some other programs I followed over the years.

  6. | May 8, 2018

    Pretty satisfied, didn’t lose 6-10 pounds in 2 weeks like advertised, but I did lose 4.5 pounds and I only want to lose 12 pounds total, so I guess it depends on how much you have to lose. I’m now doing the Live it plan, week one, it’s much easier, I just hope its as effective.

  7. | October 22, 2017

    Didn’t really work for me. I gave it a try because it was cheap, but I always lacked motivation to lose weight and this program didn’t help me get any more motivated. I stuck to it for 2 days, then cheated on the third day and then simply gave up. Not saying that it cannot work for anyone, but getting meals instead of recipes would be much easier and I don’t think it can work for people like me, who need greater motivation.

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