Vegetarian Diet For Weight Loss

You know you’re ready to lose weight, keep it off, and get back to the wonderful life that you deserve. That’s great! A vegetarian diet may be the right approach to help you shed pounds and feel happier and healthier in your own skin.

What Is A Vegetarian Diet for Weight Loss?

For those who don’t know, a vegetarian diet is when you avoid eating meat. However, you can still consume animal products, such as honey or cheese. Many vegetarians also eat eggs, though some vegetarians reject eating eggs for the same reason that they reject eating meat.

What Should You Be Eating On A Vegetarian Diet?

A healthy vegetarian diet goes beyond just avoiding animal protein such as meat and fish. After all, if you stop eating meat but you still eat white bread and drink soda every day, you’re not going to be very healthy.

The vegetarian diet that we recommend is a plant-based whole foods diet. You should consume a lot of unrefined plants (for example, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains). You should eat healthy carbohydrates such as baked potatoes, quinoa, and corn. For protein, we recommend leafy greens, along with nuts and healthy grains. In addition to avoiding meat, you should also avoid highly refined foods such as artificial sweeteners and bleached flour. 

A good vegetarian meal might consist of a large salad, a bowl of quinoa, and some nuts. 

As Michael Pollan, professor of science journalism and author of several books on nutrition, put it, “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

What Are Some High-Protein Vegetarian Foods for Weight Loss?

Some people worry that they won’t get enough protein if they become vegetarian, because so much of their protein comes from meat and fish. But the truth is that a plant-based diet can include lots of high-protein foods. 

Greek yogurt is a great option; a cup of greek yogurt has 23 grams of protein. Cottage cheese has even more protein, at 28 grams per cup.

Nuts can be a great source of protein too. Almonds have 6 grams of protein per ounce, and peanut butter has 7 grams of protein per two tablespoons.

For lunch and dinner, lentils and quinoa can be excellent sources of protein. Lentils have 18 grams of protein per cup, and quinoa has 8 grams per cup.

Many seeds are also high in protein. So are greens such as alfalfa sprouts and broccoli.

What Are the Benefits of A Vegetarian Diet?

The benefits of going vegetarian include: increased fiber consumption, reduced caloric intake, improved heart health, longer life expectancy, and weight loss. Many studies show that a diet like this can improve your health so that you feel slimmer and happier in your own skin.

Increased Fiber Consumption

One benefit of a plant-based whole foods diet is that it’s high in fiber. Plant foods naturally have a lot of fiber, especially non-starchy vegetables such as leafy greens. Green peas, lentils, black beans, and many types of fruit are all high in fiber. 

As part of your diet, we highly recommend that you avoid processed foods such as white bread and sugar. These foods are high in calories and low in fiber; replacing them with plants and whole foods can help you to get more fiber in your system.

Fiber aids with digestion and has also been linked to lower risk of heart disease.

Reduced Calories

A healthy vegetarian diet, full of plant-based whole foods, is excellent for weight loss because it naturally reduces the number of calories that you’ll need to consume. 

One reason is the increased fiber that such a diet provides. Fiber makes you feel fuller for longer, which can reduce cravings. Another reason is that processed foods are often high in calories, especially relative to the nutrition that they actually deliver. When you cut down on processed foods and replace them with whole foods (for example, replacing white rice with a baked potato), you’ll naturally consume fewer calories. Your body also absorbs fewer calories when you eat whole foods compared to processed foods; so even if you’re eating the same number of calories as before, when you eat whole foods your body is retaining fewer calories.

Heart Health

Multiple studies show that vegetarians have a lower risk of heart disease, as well as a lower risk of diabetes and even certain types of cancer. Many people who become vegetarian also find that they have lower blood pressure and cholesterol. In fact, one study in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that people who adopted a plant-based diet were 32% less likely to die from a cardiovascular condition.

One reason for this is that meat can include environmental toxins and breakdown toxins called TMAOs. These toxins are especially pronounced in red meat, but also exist in seafood and some full-fat dietary products such as whole milk. These toxins can increase your risk of cancer and heart disease. When you switch to being vegetarian, you dramatically reduce how many of these harmful toxins you are putting in your body (to reduce how many of these toxins you are putting in your body even further, consider a plant-based whole foods vegan diet).

Longer Life Expectancy

A team of researchers at Loma Linda University tracked the diets, lifestyle, and diseases of 34,000 Americans over 14 years, and found a pretty remarkable trend: vegetarians live longer. Vegetarian men lived an average of 10 years longer than non-vegetarian men, and vegetarian women lived an average of 6 years longer than non-vegetarian women.

Why? When you eat a plant-based diet, you get lots of fiber and resistance starch, as well as plant compounds such as antioxidants and phytochemicals. You also consume less cholesterol and fewer saturated fats. And, as mentioned above, you absorb a lot less environmental and breakdown toxins. All of this reduces your risk of disease and helps vegetarians, on average, to live a lot longer.

Weight Loss

Research suggests that a plant-based diet can help some people to lose weight. A 2016 meta-analysis found that people who became vegetarian lost substantially more weight than people who ate diets that contained meat.

But why do you lose weight on a vegetarian diet?

One reason for this weight loss may be that a plant-based diet is high in fiber, and often lower in calories, than other diets. Another is that this type of diet can actually improve your metabolism: there is some evidence to suggest that eating a plant based whole foods diet can boost your metabolic rate by up to 14%. As one article in Healthline puts it, “diets that include lots of vegetables tend to produce the greatest weight loss.”

Taking the Next Step On Your Weight Loss Journey

If you just want to lose 20-30 pounds, then becoming a vegetarian may be exactly what you need to shed some weight and feel better in your body.

But if you suffer from obesity, the unfortunate truth is that simply changing your diet is unlikely to lead to the lasting weight loss that you yearn for and deserve. It’s essential that you understand that this is not your fault. When you suffer from obesity, your body works overtime to keep you at that same weight. Many people diet and exercise like champions and lose 50 pounds or even more, only to watch as the scale creeps back up the moment they revert to their old habits.

If this is you, then there’s good news. Bariatric surgery can help you stop the yo-yo weight loss by helping you to lose weight and keep it off. It can help you to lose 100-150 pounds or even more and get back to the wonderful life that you deserve.

Many of our patients report that the decision to undergo bariatric surgery was among the best decisions they ever made.

“Today, 2 years later and 105 pounds less I am a new person. No walker, no cane, no Oxygen. I am completely cured of diabetes and off all those meds.”—Colleen White, gastric bypass patient.

If you’re suffering, don’t wait. Reach out to our friendly office staff today.