What Do You Eat on Jenny Craig?

Jenny Craig is a weight loss clinic that focuses on the consumption of pre-packaged meals. The fundamental idea behind the Jenny Craig system is that, by eating the meals they prepare and send, you will lose weight. These pre-packaged meals are delivered frozen and are meant to provide the majority of your daily food intake.

Menu

• The Jenny Craig menu consists of primarily pre-packaged foods, delivered frozen from Jenny Craig. The frozen foods offer options for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The pre-packaged foods offer a variety of different selections for each meal, and are designed to be supplemented with limited portions of healthy food purchased from your grocery store. Jenny Craig delivers meals that are composed of approximately 20 percent protein, 20 percent fat and 60 percent carbohydrates. Low fat dairy products, fruits and vegetables are purchased from the grocery store as supplements to the delivered meals.

Breakfast

• A wide variety of choices are available as pre-packed foods from Jenny Craig. In addition, Jenny Craig recommends foods you can purchase from the grocery store for breakfast to supplement the prepackaged frozen foods. Breakfast can include blueberry pancakes with vegetable sausage (a prepackaged frozen meal), a Banana Nut Muffin (purchased from Jenny Craig's menu selection), various types of healthy Jenny Craig cereal (including Maple Nut, Frosted Oat, Complete Start and Cranberry Almond), a stuffed breakfast sandwich, a breakfast scramble or several other options. This breakfast can be supplemented with a portion of fruit purchased fresh.

Lunch

• The Jenny Craig pre-packaged food menu for lunch includes a number of different options including soups (chicken noodle, chowder, beef barley stew, etc.), sandwiches (beef panini, turkey club panini, chicken sandwich), turkey burgers, chicken salad, rotini or a number of other options. This meal, as well, can be supplemented with small portions of fruits or vegetables from the local grocery store.

Dinner

• The Jenny Craig dinner options are also vast and include various forms of beef, chicken and pork. These pre-made dinner options may also be supplemented with a small salad or small portion of vegetables. There are a wide variety of different dinner options available to cater to most tastes, however the calorie content of dinners is also small and the portion sizes are moderate.

Snacks and Desserts

• Snacks and desserts can either consist of Jenny Craig pre-packaged food items, including portions of cake, cookies, pretzels, popcorn or crackers. Fresh fruit is also an option for desserts and/or snacks, as are vegetables including cut raw carrots, broccoli, etc.

The Main Diet

• The main idea behind the Jenny Craig diet is that no food is off limits in moderation. With this premise in mind, the idea is that the Jenny Craig diet can be sustained once dieters graduate from eating the Jenny Craig food to eating food from general grocery stores that they prepare themselves. The wide selection of food available at the Jenny Craig website focuses on both using healthy ingredients and portion control. The pre-packaged foods allow dieters to become used to eating smaller portions without the need for calorie counting. This modification, along with counseling by Jenny Craig staff and an emphasis on exercise, helps to ensure that dieters will keep the weight off once they begin to prepare food for themselves.

Limitations of the Diet

• The prepackaged meals provided by Jenny Craig do not cater to vegans or those with food allergies, so those with these specific needs may not be able to succeed on this diet.