Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (2 page)

Did you know?

• On a healthful vegan diet, weight comes off effortlessly and sustainably, without calorie counting.
  
• Fiber, which is only found in plant-based foods, is something of a weight-loss magician. It fills your stomach quickly (by holding water) and fools your brain into thinking you are full.
  
• A plant-based diet revs your metabolism, causing you to burn calories up to 16% faster than you would on a non-plant-based diet for at least the first 3 hours after meals.
  
• Most of us only overeat when we’re eating the wrong foods. When we’re eating healthfully, our bodies know when to stop and “turn off” our hunger switch.
  
• Plant-based foods are naturally low in fat. It’s very hard to be—or stay—overweight on a vegan diet.
  
• A fat gram has 9 calories; a carbohydrate has only 4. By avoiding fats—like these found in meat and cheese—you avoid lots of calories.
  
• The quick results some people get with high-animal protein, low-carb diets don’t last because most of the loss is water—or unsustainable calorie deprivation.
  
• It’s simply a myth that vegans have a hard time getting enough protein. Besides, most Americans eat far more protein than their bodies need or can successfully use. And because it comes from animals, the protein is accompanied by a lot of fat, too.
  
• Processed carbohydrates like the ones found in white bread, conventional cakes and cookies, and your basic junk food give you a cheap high and a fast crash, causing you to keep eating. The carbs found in whole grains give you energy over a much longer period of time and spare you the crash (and subsequent binge) altogether.
  

Anyone who has struggled with weight knows how hard it can be to lose it and especially to keep it off. Even those of us who aren’t seriously overweight often struggle with extra pounds that we’re just not comfortable with, or find ourselves embarrassed by a body image we instinctively know is not right.

There are probably a thousand different programs and diets out there promising quick weight loss, and most dieters will try several over the course of a lifetime—with only limited success. As you’ve no doubt heard or read or experienced, most dieters end up losing and gaining back hundreds of pounds over a lifetime, and usually gain back more than they’ve lost in each successive round. Why? To put it very simply, it’s because with all these big dietary shifts the metabolism gets really confused and can’t settle on “normal.” When you eat a mostly plant-based diet, all that changes.

Eating vegan is not a weight-loss program per se, but weight loss
is
one of the great side effects of eating a healthy, plant-based diet. But you don’t have to take it just from me. Later in this chapter you’ll be able to listen in on my conversation with Dr. Dean Ornish, who probably knows more about the way fats are processed in our bodies than anyone on the planet. He will explain, in easy-to-understand terms, just why our bodies process food so efficiently when we stop eating animals or at least move toward a plant-based diet.

A moment of truth here: If you continue to eat processed foods full of sugar and fat, you won’t lose weight. But you knew that. And that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to discover how good you’ll feel on a diet of vegetarian proteins, whole grains, and all the glorious and diverse vegetables and fruits of the earth.

If you look around, you won’t see many fat vegans. Vegans tend to be slim and strong, gorgeous and glowing, and that’s because a healthy, plant-based diet creates vitality and vigor—and weight loss simply happens as a result of not eating fatty animal protein.

And lest you think a plant-based diet is for weaklings, consider bulls, elephants, gorillas, orangutans, and stallions. These plant eaters are pure lean and powerful muscle.

Of course some people think vegans are thin because once you eliminate meat there’s nothing good left to eat or because we’re unbearably choosy eaters. Hardly! When you start focusing your diet on plant-based foods, a magnificent array of flavors and colors and textures and aromas opens to you and awakens your appetite to some really incredible vegetarian dishes.

We’ve become so accustomed to the taste of salt and sugar and the mouthfeel of fats, but once we move toward this other way of eating, we find that we lose our taste for thick, greasy, and unhealthy foods and that eating nonanimal foods leaves us feeling light and energized.

The Diet Your Body Is Designed For

The fact is our bodies aren’t meant to ingest meat and dairy and eggs and fish. That’s right, our bodies aren’t meant to eat animals; they’re made for whole grains, vegetarian proteins like beans and legumes, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds. We may be omnivores in that our bodies are
capable
of living on just about anything—flesh included—in times of scarcity. But unless you are living in sub-Saharan Africa or some isolated part of the North Pole, scarcity is, fortunately, not a problem. In fact we are blessed with abundance. Our modern problem is obesity and all the degenerative diseases that are linked to obesity, like cancer, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.

When we eat what our bodies were designed for, we thrive. All we have to do is look at what our own physiology shows us: Our molars are like those of an herbivore, flat and blunt, making them good for grinding, not gnashing and tearing. Our hands are nimble and flexible and great for picking fruits from trees and scooping vegetables from the ground; they don’t have claws to tear open flesh. We don’t have the concentration of hydrochloric acid in our stomachs necessary for the proper digestion of raw meat. And finally, a carnivore’s intestine is short and straight—perfect for quickly getting rid of rotting flesh, whereas ours is long and winding with notches along the inside that slow down the digestive process. Meat often rots on its way through our complex digestive system. There is an excellent article that covers all these details and more, titled “The Comparative Anatomy of Eating,” by Dr. Milton Mills, which you can easily find online.

Among the many diets that have been popular over the past few decades, probably few have been more influential—or controversial—than carbohydrate-elimination diets. Yes, they promise—and often deliver—quick and substantial weight loss, but sadly most of them seem to be unsustainable and unhealthy, not to mention unscientific. Not only do they not work over the long run, but with their emphasis on animal foods, they’re making us fatter ultimately, while at the same time they are likely creating profound problems with our health. They make reassuring promises that we can keep eating the things we love—like cheeseburgers, chicken wings, bacon, turkey sausage, and the like—as long as we avoid the demonized carbohydrates. These trendy diets cause us great harm in so many ways.

For starters, they have people eating quantities of animal protein that our bodies simply cannot handle. As a culture we are eating twice as much animal protein as we did in the early part of the twentieth century. At the same time we have grown dangerously overweight, with more life-challenging illnesses plaguing our health-care system than at any other time in history. As I write this, three out of every five Americans is considered overweight or obese, and two out of every three of us will die of a disease that is strongly linked to obesity. And despite the fact that so much attention has been paid to this issue, as a nation our kids are getting more and more obese with each passing year. We should be alarmed by this and looking for every alternative.

The body recognizes when it has good nutrition and “turns off” the hunger switch because it has what it needs. On the other hand, when you eat heavy, fatty foods you get “addicted” to the richness and need ever more to feel satisfied. Thus, the cycle of overeating kicks in, and you never really feel fulfilled.

Your body is an amazing machine; it’s constantly calculating what’s coming in through the food you ingest, and it registers whether you are getting enough calories and nutrients to satisfy your needs. To help with this process, there are receptors in your digestive tract which notify your brain how much and what kind of nutrients and calories are being processed. A sort of switch goes off when we are satiated, and we therefore stop eating. That’s how nature intended it. But with massive advertising campaigns glorifying fast food and steak dinners and making it all look so tasty and fun to eat, it’s no wonder we start craving—and going for—that sort of heavy, fatty food. When we indulge, those natural-born internal receptors get thrown off. The unnaturally high amount of concentrated calories throws the system off, which leads to overeating.

No matter how many calories you are ingesting, if you aren’t getting what you need nutritionally, your body sends you out for more in the form of cravings or a yearning to eat something else. It’s a primal urge, and hard to ignore. It’s literally a survival mechanism that kicks in.

The body is saying (sometimes rather urgently), “I haven’t gotten enough nutrients, go get more food!” The problem is that meat, cheese, and refined carbs don’t have what it takes to satisfy the body’s needs, so the body is never satiated on a diet that is made up mostly of animal protein and junky processed food. In order to truly feel fulfilled, you need to eat good nutrient-dense, fiber-rich food. When you do, your body will feel filled up (the stretch receptors will say, “Ah, enough, thank you!”), and because you will have satisfied your essential need for real nutrients, your body will leave you alone. You will not be assailed by constant, gnawing cravings, and in essence, your hunger will be turned off. A general lack of nutrition is one of the main causes of overeating, but when you consume whole, natural foods full of fiber and vitamins, the tendency to overeat goes away and you naturally settle in to your optimal weight. You can read more about this in an excellent book called
The Pleasure Trap
by Douglas J. Lisle, PhD, and Alan Goldhamer, DC.

So why have these high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets (think Atkins, the Zone, and Eat Right for Your Blood Type) stayed around for so long? Probably because most of us have developed a great love for the taste of rich, fatty food and gratefully follow the advice of anyone who says it’s okay to keep eating it. Simple as that, really; we want to be told it’s okay (and good!) to keep doing what we’re doing. But alas, high animal protein with low carbs is
not
a good idea. Not at all. Kathleen Zelman, a spokesperson from the American Dietetic Association, in fact, calls Atkins “a nightmare diet.” And a study published in the
Journal of the American Dietetic Association
found that people who were on the diet for only twelve weeks experienced substantially heightened levels of “bad” (LDL) cholesterol. The effects differ from one person to the next, but for some the problems persist, which points to a much higher risk for heart attacks.

Dr. Neal Barnard, founder of the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) explains the problem this way:

So basically, the high–animal protein, low-carb diet appears to work at first because of water loss (this happens because the body, starving for glucose normally found in carbs, is using up stored glycogen, which holds a lot of water—1 pound glycogen holds 3 pounds of water; the first bit of weight loss you see on the low-carb diet is just water loss from losing your natural glycogen, and as soon as you allow a few carbs back in, your water weight comes right back). The diet keeps working for a bit simply because you are cutting out so many of the things you used to eat—you’re cutting calories. It will eventually cease working and could cause you serious health problems. The problem is that most people can only keep up the rigid carbohydrate restriction for so long, and even Atkins relaxes the restriction as the diet proceeds to its maintenance phase. As they bring back the range of foods they were eating before, their calorie intake rises back to where it had been. This losing and gaining is, of course, incredibly disheartening but also very unhealthy.

What to Eat to Lose Weight without Going Hungry

Eat fiber rich food! Fiber not only reduces cholesterol and keeps you regular, but it also fools your brain into thinking you are full. It holds water so your stomach feels full. You won’t go overboard with too many calories because you feel satisfied—thus, no weight gain. And fiber is only found in plant-based foods like whole grains, beans, veggies, and fruits.