Several months ago I decided to try out the Medifast Diet and have successfully lost about 50 lbs on it. Since whether or not you can stomach eating the food on a diet program like this is usually a make or break part of weight loss success, I thought I'd give a rundown of all the foods I've tried and whether they were tasty, edible, barely passable, or utterly revolting.

There's no question that if you follow the Medifast Diet, you will lose weight. I lost about 30 lbs in the first two months I was on it.

But like most diets, once you are done with the special foods and go back to eating like a normal person, the weight creeps back on. If you can successfully change your lifestyle after you stop eating their product, then I think Medifast is quite effective. If you go back to the "same old, same old", then it's a short term solution.

I was on Medifast for a few months and then stopped using it because I was cheating too much. Off the diet I gained some weight back. But now I am back on Medifast and this time I'm committed to keeping on it till I lose all my weight. So the trick will be sustaining the weight loss and not going back to my bad old habits in the end.

One thing I have noticed in particular while following the Medifast program that has turned out, for me, to be even better than the weight loss is that my skin cleared up and a lot of my GI Tract problems have disappeared. My guess is that I have some kind of food allergies. Medifast is primarily soy-based and I don't eat any wheat at all while on the program, so who knows? Maybe I have some wheat sensitivies.

My personal favorites are the Hot Cocoa, the Orange Cream shake and the Lemon Fantasy and Oatmeal Raisin Food bars. All three of them are delicious enough that I would drink or eat them even if I wasn't dieting. The Hot Cocoa is one of the few Medifast products that doesn't have any soy in it.

The Medifast shakes are the mainstay of the program and, fortunately, I found all of the shakes to be pretty good as well, but they do tend to have a faint soy aftertaste. In my opinion, the powdered packets taste better than the Ready-To-Drink shakes which just seem rather thin and uninteresting. Mixing the powdered shakes with ice in a blender improves them considerably and you can also add flavored syrups to them as long as the syrups are sugar-free.

I tried doing the same with the Ready-To-Drink and they just didn't turn out as well. I'm guess the formulation is quite a bit different.

The Soups -- There are two Medifast soups, Chicken and Minestrone. They are both tolerable, the minestrone more so, but only if you mix them with water and let them sit for an hour or three before heating them up. If you don't give the water time to soak into the dehydrated bits of noodles and vegetables, your soup will be a bit crunchy and a bit disgusting. Both need more flavor and I always added more salt, pepper and some hot tabasco or salso to the minestrone. I gave up on the Chicken.

Food Bars -- with the exception of the Oatmeal Raisin and the Lemon Fantasy (both of which I love), I find most of the Medifast food bars to be just okay as far as taste goes, but a step above what most replacement food bars taste like in general so I guess that is a plus. The other bars are Chocolate Divine, Peanut Butter, Chocolate Mint, Smore Granola and Caramel Nut.

Oatmeal Packets - I have to confess that I only eat regular oatmeal after drowning it with milk and sweet things like honey or maple syrup so it was hard for me to eat the Medifast oatmeal packets without adding lots of other stuff to them. But overall, they taste exactly like oatmeal so if you like oatmeal, then you'll like these. Flavors are peach and apple cinnamon, maple and brown sugar. I think that's all of them.

I need to state upfront, this is all my personal opinion of what I liked and what I didn't. There are lots of folks in the various Medifast forums who love the things I hate. But still... some of this stuff was just plain gross.

Chai Latte -- truly disgusting. Like the Hot Cocoa, you just mix it with water and then zap it in the microwave until it is hot enough to drink. Unlike the Hot Cocoa, which tastes exactly like cocoa, the Medifast Chai Latte taste nothing like any Chai tea you've ever had anywhere. If you've never tasted Chai, maybe that would be okay, but as I drink the stuff all the time in various forms -- powder mixes, tea bags, liquid mixes -- I found this stuff remarkably offensive.

The Puddings -- there are two Medifast puddings, banana and chocolate. They are described as "smooth, creamy and delicious". They are none of those things. What they are is powdery, chaulky and gross. It is virtually impossible to get them mixed adequately and you always end up with little lumps of powder and everything tastes vaguely grainy. The chocolate is worse than the banana.

Iced Tea -- I was sent some Iced Teas (Rasberry and Peach) as some samples with one of my Medifast orders. I am so glad i did not order a whole week's worth. I figured they would taste more or less like Snapple Ice Teas. Boy, was I wrong. So vile, I couldn't even finish drinking them. The worst soy aftertaste of any of the Medifast foods.

If you want to try Medifast for yourself, you can Get 2 Weeks of Medifast Free (just enter code: GetTwo)

I also have a hub with updated Medifast coupon codes that you should check before ordering, just in case there's a better deal.