Continued from Slim-Fast Diet Review.

Diet shakes, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, juice fasts – some people are following surprisingly old-fashioned diets and losing preconceived notions as well as pounds.

Today, certain diet programs once dismissed as hopelessly démodé are being reconsidered in the name of weight loss.

Though shedding pounds through group meetings and packaged snacks sounds hokey — wouldn’t we all rather just be French women who allegedly don’t get fat? — many are finding that such old-style methods actually work.

The Retro Diet: Slim-Fast. The passé: “A shake for breakfast, another for lunch, and a sensible dinner” is how former spokesman and baseball great Tommy Lasorda explained the plan in 1989.

By then, the diet shake, which had been introduced as a powdered formula in the 1970s, had a lingering reputation as a sludgy drink that, to some, tasted uncannily like liquid pennies. Once Slim-Fast also came in on-the-go versions, the telltale can on your desk each morning announced to coworkers that you’d put on a few.

The present: Based on consumer research and scientific studies, Slim-Fast has made the taste of the shakes richer and creamier and reformulated the percentage of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates so that dieters feel fuller longer.

They’ve also loosened up by allowing a small amount of food, such as a salad, as an accompaniment to one of the two daily meal-replacement shakes, which are now also available as bars. “I’ve noticed lots of young women at the gym eating those bars in the locker room,” says Lauren, a 25-year-old newlywed.

“And I’ve seen Slim-Fast cans in a lot of women’s refrigerators — women who I would have never thought struggled with their weight.” One of New York City’s top fashion publicists has maintained a sample size by swapping breakfast for a strawberry shake daily for the past three years.

Expert take: “Starting each morning with a breakfast shake puts people in ‘diet mode,’” says Susan Bowerman, the assistant director at UCLA Center for Human Nutrition. Still, if every morning feels like a dietary Groundhog Day, it’s easy to lose motivation.

Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, sees meal-replacement shakes as a “short-term” solution, but, she says, “over the long term, people need to learn how to deal with food in a way that manages their weight.” [via]