I recently heard from someone who asked me: "how awful would it be for me to add pepper to my Medifast lean and green meals?" I wasn't able to clarify if she meant pepper as in a spice or pepper as in a vegetable. So, in the following article, I am going to address both scenarios.
Adding Spices To Your Medifast Meals: Honestly, adding some spices to any meal can make a big difference in how that meal taste and how intense the flavors are. Medifast does allow you to add spices to your meals, but as you might suspect, they ask you to do this within reason. Seasonings are considered a condiment, at least for the purposes of this diet. The guidelines state that no condiment should have more than one gram of carbohydrates per serving (this mostly concerns the syrups and sauces.) Pepper doesn't contain carbohydrates, so you don't have to worry about that. However, you are asked to limit any food that would fall under the condiment category to three servings per day. The serving size given for pepper used as a spice in the guidelines is 1/2 teaspoons.
You may want to note that the serving sizes of dried spices and herbs are less than the fresh ones. For example, the serving size of fresh cilantro is a whole cup. You can also have a whole cup of basil and dill weed. You can have a fourth of a cup of fresh parsley. But if the spice is dried, the serving size goes down. For example, if the dill weed is dried, you can have one teaspoon instead of a cup. You can have more dried cilantro (at one tablespoon.) But this is still substantially less than if you had the cup of fresh. Some of my favorite spices to use are garlic powder and onion powder. (Yes, these are dried but a little bit goes a long way.) I sometimes will add this to the soups, the chili,or sloppy joe in addition to the lean and green meal.
And if you like spicy food (as I'm assuming you do since this article is about pepper,) then know that you can also get a little spice and heat with sauces. You're allowed to have two tablespoons of hot pepper sauce, one tablespoon of horseradish and 1/2 tablespoon of Wasabi.
In terms of the pepper that is a vegetable, you can have one half cup of it with the lean and green meal. The serving size is somewhat limited because peppers contain a little more carbohydrates than lower glycemic vegetables.
But to answer the question posed, no matter what type of pepper you mean, yes, you can have the spice pepper and the vegetable pepper on Medifast.