Dr. Klodas Reviews the Seattle Sutton Diet Program

After our series reviewing weight loss programs last month, a customer asked us to take a look at Seattle Sutton.

What Is Seattle Sutton’s Healthy Eating (SSHE)?

Seattle Sutton’s Healthy Eating (SSHE) was founded by a nurse and is a meal replacement system that provides 21 servings of food per week. You can have the food delivered to you or pick it up from a local outlet.

Reviewing the Seattle Sutton program was harder than we imagined because it’s the first food program we encountered that does not provide complete nutrition and ingredient listings on its website. Instead, we had to call and ask to have labels from some of the foods mailed to us. It’s worth noting that this is also the only food company we know that does not provide complete nutrition and ingredient lists for their foods in advance of purchase.

What was equally surprising was that even after we asked, the company mailed us only six meal information labels — two breakfasts and four lunches, but no dinners. That made it difficult for us to evaluate a full day of food, let alone have a sense of what we would get when we purchased a whole week of food. 

Given the information provided by the company, here’s our take.

What we like:

1. The foods are freshly prepared.
2. There are five weeks of rotating menus, which may help reduce the likelihood of getting bored.

Here’s what gives us pause:

1. As we mentioned before, this is the only food company we know that expects you to take it on faith that the foods they are shipping are healthy.
2. The foods may be freshly prepared, and the ingredient lists may contain recognizable ingredients, but every dish we saw contained added sugar.
3. It is difficult to see how someone ever gets off this plan. Everything comes to you pre-prepared, so you are not gaining any food skills.
4. You are tied to the plan from morning to night which makes it difficult to enjoy a meal out with your family or brunch with friends on the weekend.
5. The plan gives you the option to pick a traditional 2000 calorie plan, a 1200 calorie plan or a 1500 calorie vegetarian option. But — and this is a big but – within each of these programs you cannot select the meals you want. Each week’s menu comes as a package and you get what you get. So if you hated that Apple Pumpkin Bisque, too bad. It will be sent to you again in five weeks.
6. The plan costs about $600 per month so it’s one of the costlier eating systems we’ve come across. 

If you’re hoping to lose weight with this program, the 1200 calorie option should translate into a loss of about 6 pounds per month. The vegetarian option sets you up for about a 4 pound loss per month.

Conclusion

So what’s our final take? We would rank this program above Nutrisystem because the program uses fresh, generally recognizable ingredients to make its meals. But we really wish SSHE would provide an off-ramp. No one can stick to a strict, completely controlled eating program forever, and that’s the reason most weight loss systems eventually fail.