Ready For Your Own Vegan Weight Loss?I'm not a fan of diets, so even calling this the vegan weight loss diet scares me a little bit. It seems like many people try "diets" and few stick to them.
I think the reason this happens is because most diets focus on restricting something, and most people don't like to be restricted. The most effective diet would be one where someone changes their lifestyle completely and does not feel restricted.
I've never been on an actual diet, and I always thought of myself as a healthy eater. And remember, I was a vegetarian for a long time before I gave up seafood, eggs, and dairy products.
When I stopped eating those, I almost immediately lost weight. I was very surprised by this because I've been pretty much the same weight for the past 10 years, and I wasn't aware of the typical vegan weight loss.
I ended up going down one solid pants size and had to buy all new jeans. Mind you, that might not seem like a lot, but I was never a large person. Someone with more weight to lose would likely go down several sizes. I consider vegan weight loss to be an additional perk to the diet and lifestyle change. Again, this vegan weight loss was quite shocking to me. I felt like a vegetarian diet was very healthy and that my body needed those foods. But why then did it suddenly adjust once I stopped eating them? Not only did I look better, but I felt better too. Without dairy products in my diet, I felt lighter and happier. It was a complete detox for my system, and I was almost angry that I had spent so much time lugging around dairy in my system. My boyfriend is another great example of vegan weight loss. He is not completely vegan, but has gradually cut out meat and dairy products over the past year. He too was never a large person, but has slimmed down considerably and has to wear belts to keep his pants up.
He was a meat and dairy eater for a long time, well after we started dating. He had a sandwich with cold-cuts in it every day for lunch, yogurt, and cereal with milk in the morning. He is also an ice cream lover and ate it several times a week. But he also was a guy who had bad stomach aches several times a week and often had to spend a lot of time in the bathroom. There is one particularly tough night that I remember specifically. We were in Philly and he had a cheese steak at lunch and then steak and fish at dinner. He was in the bathroom all night and could barely move in the morning. I remember this night so well because coincidentally, it was right around the time that I started reading and he started learning through me about what meat does to your body. He hasn't had red meat since then, and guess what... he hasn't had another crazy stomach ache. That whole time his body was trying to tell him to stop putting meat in, but he didn't understand what it was saying. He had even been to a gastroenterologist to see if she could explain it, but she couldn't either. I truly think that if he knew that meat and dairy products were giving him a stomach ache, he would have quit them long before I started reading. Your body will tell you what foods to eat, if you will just listen.
A great thing to try is to evaluate how you feel when you eat certain foods. Think about Thanksgiving dinner. How do you feel when you are eating it? How about afterwards? Now think of a sushi dinner... do you feel different? When I used to eat fish, I always felt cleaner after eating sushi, lighter. Imagine when you eat a salad, how do you feel after that? Every feeling is different, and that is your body telling you something. 
Think about when you drink a ton of alcohol and the next morning you have a hangover. That is your body telling you it is sick from what you put in it. Don't get me wrong, I went to college in New Orleans and enjoy a good night as much as the next person, but I have become much more aware of how I feel after those nights. I know my body is protesting and begging me not to do it again. If only we would listen to our bodies. The funny thing is that I don't remember losing any weight when I went from meat eating to vegetarian. Granted, I was 12-years old and my body was fluctuating anyway. But, for all those years, even though I was thin, I always wanted to tighten up certain areas of my body. I couldn't believe that all it took was getting rid of the rest of the animals. After hearing about so many people who had vegan weight loss, I was shocked when one friend said to me, "I'm surprised you managed to stay so skinny. All the vegan people I know gained weight." I responded, "What??!!" It made no sense to me at first, but I realized those people are probably technically eating vegan, but are not eating healthy foods. White bread is vegan, and so is peanut butter and jelly, and tons of desserts. And there is vegan pizza and ice cream.
If you adopt a low-fat, balanced, vegan diet, you will lose weight. That means following the food pyramid's guidelines. It's really simple to do-- load your diet with whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and legumes (beans and seeds.) You can eat these foods as much as you like. If you are hungry, eat from one of these groups. Use oils sparingly, and eat sweets occasionally.
Once your diet is solidly based around these foods, you can truly whatever you want. If I feel like eating ice cream, I pull out my favorite soy cream and go at it. I eat french fries and potato chips too! I never used to like pizza before because of the melted cheese, and now I love it. But, I don't base my diet around this stuff.
I love the vegan weight loss success stories on GoVeg.com. Click here to go to their page for success stories. (opens new window) They show people from all different backgrounds and weights, and they talk about how adopting a vegan diet helped them lose weight permanently. Learned about Vegan Weight Loss? Return to Adopting a Vegan Diet
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I love meat substitutes and the innovative things that food manufacturers can do with soy products, but just because foods are vegan does not mean they're healthy. And if they are not healthy, they are not going to promote vegan weight loss.
