Do you know how to lose weight on a plant-based diet? Do you know what a plant-based diet consists of?
Can you imagine eating pasta, rice, chickpeas, legumes and potatoes and losing weight? Do you believe me if I tell you that eating this type of food can you lose all the excess weight?
This is exactly what I have been doing for almost a year now and I have lost over 18 kg. without starving or craving for food.
In addition, I have experienced dramatically positive changes in my energy level, my mood, and my addiction to certain foods.
Do you want to know where “the trick” is?
Let me tell you.
For years I have been convinced that to lose weight I had to stop eating carbohydrates, that is, bread, pasta, rice, legumes, etc.
In fact, throughout my life I have followed many diets based on this principle. So every time I had to lose weight, my diet was based on eating salads, boiled vegetables, lean meat, chicken, turkey, eggs, and grilled fish.
It is true that, when I managed to maintain this type of diet beyond a few weeks, I lost some weight, but always with great suffering.
This suffering materialized in the form of being hungry, anxious about food, having a hard time in social situations, and constantly being in a bad mood.
She did lose some weight (only at first, then quickly regained it), but she could only enjoy it when she bought new clothes in a smaller size. The rest of the time (the process until I lost several kilos in weight) was a real torture, a constant struggle between what I wanted to eat and what I should eat.
But as I had always been told that “to be thin you have to suffer, unless you have privileged genetics”, here I was, constantly suffering, putting all the willpower I had on my part to constantly control what I ate.
Have you had an experience similar to mine?
After more than 20 years of low carbohydrate diets without permanent results, about 1 year ago I radically changed my diet and surprise! I started to lose weight without anxiety, without having a bad time and without suffering. In addition, I was feeling better and better, with an amount of energy that I had not had in years.
But today I am not going to tell you all the changes that I have personally experienced, although if you are interested you can read them here. Today what I want to tell you is what this wonderful diet consists of that has radically changed my life.
What does it mean to follow a plant-based diet?
A plant-based diet basically consists of consuming foods of plant origin. In Spanish it has been translated by plant-based diet or plant-based diet (I prefer the latter term) and consists of 4 main points:
- Base your diet on the consumption of plant-based foods
- Eliminate as much as possible (or better, completely) foods of animal origin
- Eliminate processed foods
- Eliminate as much as possible (or better, completely) refined foods
- Base your diet on the consumption of plant-based foods
Vegetables, vegetables, fruits, cereals, whole grains, legumes, aromatic herbs, nuts and seeds are the basis of a plant-based diet.
These are the recommended food groups to consume on a daily basis when following a plant-based diet.
The combinations are endless and the belief that eating this type of food makes you fat is a total fallacy.
That which we have been told all our lives that chickpeas, potatoes or pasta are fattening is false. What makes us fat is the meat and the chorizo with which we cook the chickpeas, the oil we use to fry the potatoes and the cheese and the fried tomato that we use to make a pasta dish.
So the first step to eating a plant-based diet is to begin to dispel myths and begin to base our diet on plant-based foods.
- Eliminate as much as possible (or better completely) foods of animal origin
Animal foods are packed with saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium. Even those foods that traditionally have told us that they have less fat (such as chicken or fish), still have much more fat than most foods of plant origin.
Take a look at these examples per 100 grams of food:
- Chicken thigh: 11.2 g total fat (3.67 g saturated fat)
- Chicken breast: 6.2 g total fat (1.91 g saturated fat)
- Salmon: 12.1 g of total fat (2.10 g of saturated fat)
- Canned lentils: 0.7 g total fat (0.1 g saturated fat)
- Potatoes: 0.11 g of total fat (0.03 g of saturated fat)
- Brown rice: 2.20 g of total fat (0.61 g of saturated fat)
In addition, many foods of animal origin, such as red meat and processed meat, are hyper-concentrated foods that are related to food addiction, they contribute directly to overweight and obesity and the main world nutritional guidelines recommend reducing or eliminating their consumption due to the negative implications they have for health.
There are other reasons why you should stop consuming animal foods that go beyond weight loss and health. Although it is not my intention to cite them in this article, if you are interested, you can delve into the subject by clicking here.
- Eliminate as much as possible (or better completely) processed foods
Processed foods are those foods that have undergone a change due to some degree of industrial processing.
While there are some foods that have undergone minimal processing, such as cooked legumes or bagged lettuce, other products have been ultra-processed, such as pre-cooked dishes or industrial pastries.
To a greater or lesser extent, processed foods have been manipulated to improve their preservation, taste and / or appearance. To do this, high amounts of fat, salt, sugars, colorants, preservatives and sweeteners are added.
These added substances facilitate overweight, create addiction and substantially reduce the nutritional quality of food. This is the reason why it is not advisable to consume this type of food.
If you want to follow a healthy diet and take advantage of all the benefits of plant foods, it is important to eliminate processed foods as much as possible, especially those with added ingredients such as oils, salt, sugars, sweeteners, preservatives and colorings. The more ingredients a product has, the more negative for your health.
- Eliminate as much as possible (or better completely) refined foods
Refined foods are those that have been subjected to different types of manipulation until reaching their final form, destroying, during the process, part of the nutritional value of the original foods.
For example, white flours, sugar, oils, and hydrogenated fats have undergone a refining process in which fiber and other beneficial natural nutrients have been removed. This refinement turns “white” foods into hyper-concentrated foods that negatively affect our health and promote food addiction.
In turn, the absence of fiber from refined foods is bad news. Fiber is essential for our health and helps us, among other things, to keep the intestine healthy, prevent colon cancer, improve satiety and control weight.
One of the goals of eating a plant-based diet is to cut down on refined foods, starting with the most harmful ones like white flour, sugar, and highly refined oils like palm oil and hydrogenated fats.
