Are you looking to lose weight? or simply want to make sure you always have healthy dinners readily available?
That’s probably why you’re looking at Be Fit Food. They’re a full-service diet service that provides you everything to eat during their weight loss program. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks… they have you covered. They’re pioneers of the “Very Low Calorie Diet (VLCD)” meal program as a weight-loss method.
But are their meals any good? Will they help you lose weight? Can you achieve their challenge to “lose 5kg in 2 weeks”?
Let me share my experience of Be Fit Food, to help you decide if their service might be right for you. Are they the best meal delivery service for weight loss?
Be Fit Food Prepared Meals Review
Summary
Each meal averages just 220 calories with this weight-loss service designed to simplify your short-term ketosis goals. You get frozen meals packed full of flavour but with a limited variety of different options. Be Fit Food are on the more expensive end of the prepared meals market.
Overall
-
Ordering - Website - 5/10
5/10
-
Food - Quality - 7/10
7/10
-
Ordering - Meal Choice - 5/10
5/10
-
Food - Taste - 8/10
8/10
-
Ordering - Delivery - 7/10
7/10
-
Value For Money - 6/10
6/10
Pros
- Low-calorie meal options.
- Flavourful, enjoyable meals.
- Free dietitian consultation
Cons
- Very limited meal variety.
- Microwave reheating causes meals to get watery.
- Chicken and fish can be quite dry.
Be Fit Food was started in 2015 in the Mornington Peninsula by two doctors – Kate Save and Geoffrey Draper. Kate is an accredited dietitian, whilst Geoffrey is a bariatric surgery consultant of over 20 years. Those are strong credentials for starting a weight loss delivery service.
The business appeared on Shark Tank in 2017, gaining investment from Boost Juice’s Janine Allis. If you have 12 minutes spare, it’s worth a watch – Be Fit Food on Shark Tank.
Enough about the business, I tried Be Fit Food to see if their food can live up to the marketing hype.
Page Contents
Getting started with Be Fit Food
To be honest, I felt a little bit lost trying to use the Be Fit Food website. There are a lot of options, plans, packs, and offers all trying to grab your attention. It takes a bit of willpower to actually find what you’re looking for.
Be Fit Food offer two types of plans – Weight Loss and Healthy Meals as well as selling meals individually. Taking a closer look at those plans, they split into:
Weight Loss
- Rapid Weight Loss (800-900 calories)
- 3 days
- 7 days
- 14 days
- Couples Box (7 Days)
- Gradual Weight Loss (1000 – 1200 calories)
- BE 1000 7 days
- BE FIT MAN 7 days
- BE 1200 7 days
- Maintenance Programs
- Monthly Maintenance Program
- Be 5:2
Healthy Meal Bundles
- 7 meals
- 14 meals
- 28 meals
- Snack Pack Bundles
- 7 breakfasts
As you can see, the choice is to either commit to a specific program of up to 2 weeks or to buy individual meals. That’s pretty reasonable considering weight loss needs to be a holistic lifestyle commitment as opposed to the occasional healthy meal.
Whilst it’s good to have plenty of options available, these are mostly just slightly different perspectives on the same underlying meals. I wish they’d make their offering simpler to understand or help decide which is the right plan for me to choose!
Meal variety and options
At the time of writing, Be Fit Food have a variety of 26 main meals available alongside 10 breakfasts and 3 smoothies. That’s a really interesting ratio, with a far higher proportion of breakfast meals than other services.
Having just 26 main meals is an amount that could easily result in Be Fit Food becoming boring after a while. If you get the 14-day commitment, this means you will definitely need to get multiple of the same meal. Having monitored their meals for a few weeks, I can’t see they rotate or update their options very often.
Ultimately this isn’t an issue if you find a few meals you love and don’t mind eating them on a regular rotation.
One common issue with prepared meals and their variety is that they rely very heavily on chicken or beef as a cheap source of protein. From a sample of Be Fit Food meals, this is how the protein source splits out:
| Protein | % of meals |
|---|---|
| Chicken | 27% |
| Beef | 38% |
| Pork | 4% |
| Lamb | 0% |
| Fish | 4% |
| Vegetarian | 27% |
As with most other services, a vast majority of dishes available are beef or chicken.
It’s important to mention that the average caloric content of a Be Fit Food meal is just 223 calories. This is much lower than the average needs for most Australians, so caution is advised to make sure you’re following a weight loss plan suitable for your situation.
Special diets and food intolerance
Be Fit Food does not have a clear policy on how they produce meals, and whether they would be appropriate for anyone with allergies or intolerances. In light of this, I can not recommend Be Fit Food if you do have any serious allergies.
They do provide all the allergens for each meal on the website, so if you are simply trying to avoid certain products it’s possible to do this.
If you are vegetarian, there is a limited service offering. 3 breakfast options, plus 7 meals mean that Be Fit Food is likely to get boring very quickly. The vegan options aren’t worth exploring. There are better vegan meal services in Australia.
Delivery options
Be Fit Food has an extensive delivery network across all Australian states and territories, excluding Northern Territory.
You’ll find that Be Fit Food won’t be able to deliver to more remote areas, especially in South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia. You should check that Be Fit Food delivery to your postcode before progressing any further.
Standard delivery costs a whopping $19.95 flat rate to anywhere in Australia. That’s really high for any meal delivery service. However, it’s used as an incentive for you to spend more on buying meals. Delivery is FREE for orders over $199.
How much does Be Fit Food cost?
Each program at Be Fit Food has a different price, so there are some that offer more value than others. I’ll share a sample of prices here to give you an idea:
| Program | Contains | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Rapid Weight Loss – 7 Days | 7x Breakfasts 7x Lunches 7x Dinners 2x Snack Packs | $274.95 |
| Rapid Weight Loss – 14 Days | 14x Breakfasts 14x Lunches 14x Dinners 4x Snack Packs | $514.90 |
| Gradual Weight Loss – 7 Days (Be 1200) | 7x Breakfasts 7x Lunches 7x Entrees 7x Dinners 2x Snack Packs | $355.95 |
| Maintenance – Intermittent Fasting | 8x Lunches 8x Dinners 1x Snack Pack | $228.90 |
Researching this, I noticed a weird quirk around the term “entree”. Be Fit Food simply considers this to be an additional dinner meal. This does make sense as meals are only around 220 calories but it’s important to know that there’s no difference in the options available for entree / lunch / dinner.
If you choose to create your own box, the main meals cost an expensive $13.95. It’s much better value to opt for one of the longer diet plans, where individual meal costs can be as low as $10.
Even then, this is expensive for a meal delivery service. You are paying for the additional support, community, and meal planning that Be Fit Food provides. They are certainly priced more in line with a full weight loss service like Noom.
Featured Service
My Be Fit Food box
Be Fit Food deliveries are scheduled between 7am and 5am and I had received a tracking link suggesting my box would arrive at around 8am. It promptly arrived at 8:35am which is pretty accurate compared to most delivery trackers!
There’s no doubt that the packaging is bright. They really went to town with the yellow colouring!
Even though it had been raining all morning, the box had remained undamaged and got only slightly wet. No problems. I opened the box up and everything was neatly packed inside. There was no delivery note or leaflet, just the meals I had ordered.
Notably, all the meals arrive frozen, not chilled. They should be stored in the freezer and only defrosted before use.
Recycling the contents
I really worry about the environmental impact of all these meal delivery services, so I prefer to buy from places that have 100% recyclable materials.
Fortunately, that is the case with Be Fit Food.
Black Meal Containers & Cardboard Box – Rinsed and placed in a normal recycling bin.
Silver Liner – Place in a soft plastics recycling bin at your local supermarket.
Ice Packs – These can be re-used, or cut open and empty the (non-toxic) contents down the sink. The casings should be recycled at the soft plastics bein with your silver liner.
How’s the food?
Most prepared meal services suffer from the same problem when freezing their meals… the process results in a lot of meals becoming watery. This is a direct result of vegetables being frozen/thawed and there isn’t a lot that can be done about it.
However, that was one of my first observations with most Be Fit Food meals. They were very fluid and watery. Be Fit Food recommend draining this excess water before eating, but this is impossible when it’s the meal itself that’s mixed in with the water. An example is this Beef Chow Mein. You just end up accepting it’s going to be a bit… soupy.
On the whole, Be Fit Food managed to pack a lot of flavour into their meals. Through clever use of herbs and spices, it makes each meal very tasty without adding any extra calories. I found a majority of the meals very enjoyable to eat and surprisingly filling.
Yep, even eating just ~200 calories of food was quite filling with these meals. I didn’t often feel a massive need to have any more food after a Be Fit Food meal. That was probably the biggest (positive) surprise of my whole experience.
Protein problems
One area where Be Fit Food struggled was to keep the protein sources juicy and tender. The freezing, defrosting, and microwaving process wasn’t kind to many of the chicken and fish dishes. I felt they were too often quite dry and tough to eat.
For example, the Cauliflower Fried Rice and Chicken was exceptionally dry. It’s a strange problem to have when most meals are watery!
Soup as dinner
I wouldn’t usually associate soup with dinner, although I can understand that it’s a very low-calorie meal to have. That makes soup a good option for Be Fit Food and they offer 6 different soup recipes to order.
Having tried them, I can promise they are nicer when cooked on the stove rather than in the microwave. Soup out of the microwave has a tendency to stay quite watery, but when cooked in the pan it does thicken up much better.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t find either soup particularly filling. You’d need some extra willpower not to add any other food to bulk up these meals.
Cooking the prepared meals
Each meal has slightly different cooking instructions, with options including microwave, oven and stove.
From frozen, meals can take up to 5 minutes in microwave to reheat (or 3 minutes after defrosting). In the microwave, this is a punishing amount of time for any food and often causes a loss of texture.
If you have time, I highly recommend reheating meals on the stove or in the oven. Just remember to transfer food into an ovenproof dish if going down that route.
Dishes I loved
- Italian Beef Meatballs
- Protein & Bolognese
- Spicy Mexican Pulled Beef
- Chunky Chicken, Ham & Sweetcorn Soup
Dishes I wouldn’t recommend
- Wholemeal Beef Lasagne
- Chilli & Ginger Baked Fish
- Cauliflower Fried Rice & Chicken
Losing weight with Be Fit Food
The Be Fit Food service doesn’t end with just the food. They provide some additional services to help people diet more effectively and compliment their meals with a better lifestyle.
Free Dietitian Consultation – Before you order, you can request a 15-minute consultation with a qualified dietitian who can give you advice on the best Be Fit Food program for you. I didn’t test this service, but it’s useful knowing it’s available.
Be Fit Foodies Group – Join over 6,000 members of the Be Fit Food community who can provide extra support and help on your dieting journey – Facebook.
Be Fit Rewards – For every dollar spend with Be Fit Food, earn 2 points in their rewards program. 500 points get you a $5 voucher which is cashback rate of 2%. You can also boost your points by referring friends (or having lots of birthdays!).
I’d love to see them add a few more offerings here, perhaps including exercise plans or community support sessions that would be beneficial to anyone trying to lose weight.
My Final Thoughts on Be Fit Food
I’m ending up on the fence with Be Fit Food.
I really want to love the service as a great starting place for people wanting to go on low-calorie diets. There’s no doubt this is the best meal service for cutting calories. At just ~220 calories, these are small meals that still manage to feel like they fill you up.
However, I was disappointed by some of the textures and dryness (of the meat) in various meals. The meal variety and options are quite limited, particularly if you have a special dietary requirement. It’s an expensive service and you’ll only get the benefits if you stick religiously to the weekly meal plans.
The biggest quick win they could have is to make the Be Fit Food community feel more welcoming, much like Lite n Easy does.
If you want to spend 7 or 14 days on a serious caloric deficit and want to outsource all of the calorie counting, then definitely give Be Fit Food a try.
