Diets. No one wants to go on one but there comes a time-especially after the holidays and before bathing suit season-when the overindulging has to stop. The main stumbling blocks with diets are that they have a reputation for taking time, require tremendous discipline, cost a lot, and the notion of curbing your enthusiasms just isn't very fun. For those who cook a lot, they have to learn how to eliminate and substitute certain ingredients and dishes.
Related: Our Complete Guide to Eating Healthy and Losing Weight
At Epicurious, we spend a lot of time cooking healthy, low-calorie recipes but we recognize that even the most enthusiastic home cooks don't always have time to whip up a meal; so we took a hard look at the diet delivery world in search of tasty meals that are both reasonably priced and healthy. Believe it or not, such commercial diet plans do exist. We focused on companies that sell nationwide, offering meals that are available either fresh daily, packaged using MAP (modified atmosphere packaging) technology, flash frozen, or frozen, and can be ready to eat in just a few minutes. Of the dozens of options, we found eight well-known brands that met our criteria, and of those, three diets we would all happily go on for a sustained amount of time.