Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (4 page)
Read Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World Online
Authors: Kathy Freston
Tags: #food.cookbooks
To put it more simply, your average daily protein intake should be about 15 to 20 percent of your total daily calories (other sources say it can be even less—more like 10.7 percent)—a number easy to get to on a plant-based diet. There is protein in just about everything. So as long as you are eating a varied diet of whole grains, beans, and legumes, vegetables, fruits, and meat and dairy alternatives, you will be just fine.
No, there is absolutely no need to consume animal foods to get enough protein. In fact the American Dietetic Association holds that vegan diets provide more than enough protein, even without any special food combinations. Nutritionists used to think you needed to eat “complementary proteins”—beans
and
rice, for example—in one sitting to get all the nutrients we needed. We now know that’s not true. As long as you are eating a bit of everything throughout the day, all is well.
Protein should account for about 15%–20% of your total daily calories—a number easy to get to on a plant-based diet.
When looking at the protein picture, it’s important to consider what the Harvard School of Public Health calls the “protein package”—the saturated fats that come along with all meats, even so-called lean meat. You might find it surprising that skinless roasted chicken breast—the leanest chicken that could be, and way leaner than other meats—has 20 percent of its calories in fat, and 29 percent of which is saturated. That same 3-ounce piece of chicken also has 73 milligrams of cholesterol. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, only 7 percent
or less
of our daily fat intake should be from saturated fats. Eating animal protein makes consuming a low-fat, especially low-
saturated
fat, diet very difficult and a cholesterol-free diet impossible.
The best way to progress toward your ideal weight is to increase your intake of thermogenic foods without also increasing your intake of fats. Just follow this basic rule of thumb: If it’s a whole grain, bean, fruit, or vegetable, you can eat as much of it as you want—and as long as you are not also piling on fat-rich animal foods, you will watch the pounds melt off and stay off.
But don’t just take it from me. Listen to what the renowned nutritional scientist and vegetarian advocate Dr. Dean Ornish has to say.
Straight from the Source: Dean Ornish, MD, on Losing Weight
No one has done more peer-reviewed research on the subject of weight loss and overall health than Dr. Ornish. He sparked a revolution in cardiology by proving that heart disease could be reversed with lifestyle (diet) changes, and his current research is showing that those very changes also affect gene expression: in other words, it seems we can turn on or turn off genes that affect cancer, heart disease, and longevity. He is the founder and the president of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. I interviewed Dr. Ornish on weight loss and diet.
KF:
It’s widely believed that people lose weight fastest on a high protein diet. But is it true?
DO:
Initially, they may lose more weight because they are losing water weight. But by the end of a year, the weight usually returns. In general, slower weight loss by eating more healthfully is more sustainable. Slow but steady wins the race.
Most Americans also eat too many refined carbohydrates. When they go on a typical high-protein diet, they reduce their intake of all carbohydrates, which for most Americans means they primarily reduce their intake of refined carbohydrates. This [in itself] helps them to lose weight.
Whenever I debated Dr. [Robert] Atkins before he died, he was usually described as the “low carb” doctor and I was the “low fat” doctor. But that was never accurate. I have always advocated that an optimal diet is lower in total fat, very low in “bad fats” (saturated fat, hydrogenated fats, and trans-fatty acids), high in “good carbs” (fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and soy products), low in “bad carbs” (sugar, white flour, processed foods), and with enough of the “good fats” (omega-3 fatty acids) and high-quality proteins.
There are clear benefits to reducing the intake of refined carbohydrates, especially in people who are sensitive to them. The solution is not to go from refined carbohydrates like pasta to pork rinds and from sugar to sausage, but to substitute refined bad carbs with unrefined good carbs.
An optimal diet is:
- very low in “bad fats”: saturated fat (butter and other animal fats), hydrogenated fats, and trans-fatty acids the kind found in margarine, vegetable shortening, and anything with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in its ingredients list)
- high in “good carbs”: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and soy products
- low in “bad carbs”: sugar, white flour, processed foods
- “good fats” (omega-3 fatty acids, such as the ones found in flax seeds, walnuts, and canola oil) and high-quality proteins.
Good carbs are naturally high in fiber. The fiber fills you up before you eat too much. For example, it’s hard to get too many calories from eating apples or whole grains, because apples are naturally low in calories and high in fiber, so you feel full before you consume too many calories.
Also, the fiber in good carbs causes your food to be digested and absorbed into your bloodstream more slowly. This helps to regulate your blood sugar into a normal range—neither too high nor too low.
When whole wheat flour is processed into white flour, or brown rice into white rice, the fiber and bran are removed. This turns a “good carb” into a “bad carb.” Why? Because when the fiber and bran are removed, there is nothing to slow the digestion or signal that the body is full.
A NOTE FROM KF: THERE’S NOTHING FISHY ABOUT THESE OMEGA-3s
You will often hear people say that fish oil is the best source of omega-3 fatty acids. While it may be true that we are better able to assimilate the omega-3s in fish oil than from traditional vegan sources like flax oil, we now have a wonderful alternative. It turns out that fish obtain omega-3s by eating algae. With this in mind, several supplement makers are now extracting EPA and DHA (two key components of omega-3s) directly from the algae. You no longer have to participate in harming the environment through industrial fishing or inflicting suffering on fish and “bycatch” (birds, turtles, and dolphins caught and killed in fishing nets), or expose yourself to high levels of PCB and mercury contamination just to get your best sources of omega-3s. This brilliant solution supports becoming a veganist with ease.
KF:
How should one eat in order to lose weight?
DO:
Mindfully. It’s not just
what
you eat, but also
how
you eat that matters. Have you ever eaten a bag of popcorn while watching an intense movie? All your attention is focused on the movie—so you may look down and see that the bag of popcorn is empty. You got all the calories but little of the pleasure. In contrast, if you really pay attention to your food, savoring it as you would a fine wine, you have greatly enhanced pleasure with fewer calories. And pleasure is sustainable.
KF:
What should be avoided?
DO:
As described above, avoid refined carbohydrates, too much fat (especially trans fats, which cause weight gain), and processed foods.
KF:
Should we count calories? Fat grams? Carbs?
DO:
In my experience, if you eat predominantly a whole foods, plant-based diet that is naturally high in fiber and low in fat and in refined carbohydrates, and if you eat it mindfully, you don’t have to count anything to lose weight. You feel full before you consume too many calories.
KF:
What are some of the health risks of being overweight?
DO:
Being overweight significantly increases the risk of virtually every chronic disease. Some authorities have said that obesity is now overtaking smoking as the most preventable cause of premature death.
KF:
How do you break through cravings for unhealthy food—because they really do have a hold on most of us!
DO:
As you begin to eat more healthfully, your taste preferences change. You begin to prefer foods that are more healthful. And you connect the dots between what you eat and how you feel—because these mechanisms are so dynamic, most people find that they feel so much better, so quickly, it reframes the reason for changing from living longer to feeling better.
KF:
What is a reasonable rate of weight loss?
DO:
In most cases, no more than three pounds per week.
KF:
What if we want to lose weight faster? Is there a healthy way to do it?
DO:
Do more exercise and meditation and eat smaller amounts of healthy foods and less salt. Regular exercise not only burns calories, it also raises your basal metabolic rate, the number of calories you burn while at rest. Thus, exercise helps you lose weight even when you’re not exercising. Do some strength training as well as aerobic exercise. Walking a mile burns even more calories than running a mile. Exercise in ways that you enjoy, then you’re more likely to do it. If it’s fun, it’s sustainable.
I also want to make the point that you have a spectrum of choices; it’s not all or nothing. In our research, we learned something very powerful: the more you change, the better you feel and the more you heal. What’s sustainable are joy, pleasure, and freedom.
If you go
on
a diet, sooner or later you’re likely to go
off
a diet—because a diet is what you can’t have and what you must do. Even more than feeling healthy, most people want to feel free and in control.
What matters most is your overall way of living and eating. If you indulge yourself one day, then eat healthier the next. If you forget to exercise or meditate one day, do more the next. You get the idea. It’s a very compassionate approach.
Some of the most toxic emotions are guilt, humiliation, and shame. If you go on a diet or a lifestyle program and feel like you have to follow it rigidly, then you’re setting yourself up for feeling guilty, humiliated, and ashamed. The language of behavioral modification often has a moralistic quality to it that turns off a lot of people (like “cheating” on a diet).
It’s a small step from thinking of foods as “good” or “bad” to seeing yourself as a “good person” or a “bad person” if you eat them, and this creates downward spirals in a vicious cycle. For example, once you feel like you’re a bad person for eating some ice cream, it’s all too easy to say, “Well, I blew it, so I might as well finish the entire pint.” Studies have shown that those who eat the healthiest overall are the ones who allow themselves some indulgences.
If you’re trying to reverse heart disease or prevent the recurrence of cancer, you may need the “pound of cure”—that is, bigger changes in diet and lifestyle than someone who just wants to lower their cholesterol levels a few points or lose a few pounds. Offering a spectrum of choices is much more effective; then, you feel free. If you see your food and lifestyle choices each day as part of a spectrum, as a way of living, then you are more likely to feel empowered and to be successful.
KF:
If someone is too busy to cook, and is in a big hurry, what is the best and most affordable approach?
DO:
There are more and more healthy prepared and frozen meals on the market. Eat with your friends and take turns shopping and cooking—not only does it save time, but when you fill your heart with the love of friends and family in a shared meal, you have less need to overfill your belly.
For more information, you can visit Dr. Ornish’s website at www.pmri.org.
Now let’s meet someone who has put all this into play and transformed himself. Here’s Ben Goldsmith’s account of how he changed. I saw him recently at a party and didn’t even recognize him. I’d seen pictures of him when he was heavier, and heard that he had a great weight-loss story, but the difference between then and now was astounding. Ben lost a total of 70 pounds, and he did it fairly effortlessly. His changes were motivated by health, but also by his ethics, a combination that seemed to work for him.
Ben Goldsmith’s Story: Weight Loss Was an Unexpected Benefit
Being overweight is difficult at any age, but it’s particularly difficult, I think, for those of us who were overweight as children. Comments about our weight by strangers, family, and friends—however harmless they were intended to be—were incredibly painful reminders of a reality over which I had virtually no control and wanted so badly to change. As a kid I didn’t know what
carbohydrate
or
calorie
meant. All I knew was I looked different from my friends, and I wanted more than anything to fit in.
I became self-conscious about my weight pretty early on. As a ten-year-old, I dreaded swimming lessons at summer camp because it meant taking off my shirt. I avoided looking down, particularly in pictures, because I knew it exaggerated my double chin. Riding on the school bus, I’d keep my knees together and try to take up as little space on the seat as possible.
My diet was never all that different from anyone else’s. We mostly ate dinner at home and only had fast food occasionally. My parents packed the same ham and cheese sandwiches in my lunch that my friends’ parents packed in theirs. But, for some reason, I always tended to be a little heavy.
Even though I had friends and a loving family, being overweight as a child made me feel sad and alone. It’s a little hard to explain, but I always felt like I was different and that there was something wrong with me. The sadness went away when I did things that allowed me to forget about my body, and there were a few things that could always cheer me up. One of them was being around animals. Animals saw me the way I wanted to be seen: as a person just like anyone else.
Like many high schools around the country, my school allowed students to leave campus for lunch. And, like most schools in the United States, there were several fast-food restaurants within walking distance. Beginning in ninth grade, my friends and I ate fast food for lunch virtually every day. Not surprisingly, that’s when I went from being heavier than my friends to being significantly overweight. By my junior year, at roughly five six, I weighed just over 200 pounds.
Having been overweight my entire life, I think at some point I just gave up. It didn’t matter if I was a little heavy or seriously overweight. I was a fat kid and that wasn’t going to change. The best I could do was eat the food my friends ate; at least that way I’d be one of them. At one point during my sophomore year, my friends invented a weekly event they called Meat Fest. Meat Fest, held at lunch on Fridays, entailed eating as much of as many different kinds of meat as we possibly could. My Meat Fest meal of choice: A double bacon cheeseburger with gyro meat and sausage from a local fast-food joint that was conveniently located on the same block as my high school. With fries and a Coke, I think it probably cost around $7.
I was never a particularly sedentary kid, mind you, even during the glory days of Meat Fest. All of this happened prior to the proliferation of wireless Internet connections, high school kids with cell phones, and Xbox Online. Hell, I was on the tennis team! I was a normal American kid eating normal American food doing normal American things. As I would come to find out a couple of years later, low and behold, the problem wasn’t how often I ate or how little I exercised. The problem was the food I chose to eat.
On a spring day during my junior year of high school, my friend Katie and I had plans to catch a movie after school, and she’d invited a friend of hers, Ryan, to come along. The plan was to pick up Ryan on the way to the theater, and Katie and I decided to stop at McDonald’s before heading to his house. While we were eating, Katie told me that Ryan ate a vegan diet, and she insisted we keep our stop at McDonald’s a secret.
This struck me as odd. As far as I was concerned, we weren’t doing anything wrong. I’d heard that PETA was boycotting KFC at the time, and I would have understood the need for secrecy if we’d been eating there, but this was McDonald’s—what could be so wrong about that? Still, the last thing I wanted to do was offend him, so I gladly agreed to keep our lunch between us.
Later we went back to Ryan’s house and hung out. He seemed like a cool guy, and we had a lot in common. Nothing about Ryan suggested that his beliefs were fundamentally different from mine. Ryan offered Katie and me something to drink after a while: he had OJ, Coke, bottled water, and rice milk. I’d never heard of rice milk, so I asked if I could give it a try. It wasn’t the best thing I’d ever tasted, but it wasn’t bad either.
Why, I wondered, would this guy my own age deprive himself of a glass of milk, a Big Mac, or a plate of cheese fries? Given how much I enjoyed those things, his decision to abstain based on a set of beliefs actually struck me as rather commendable. He had to feel pretty strongly about it to refuse something so delicious. So I asked him why he chose to be vegan. His answer—that he wasn’t willing to cause suffering to other living creatures, and then his recitation of lots of intense and awful details about that suffering—changed my life.
Effective that day, I was vegan, and have been ever since. It just made sense. Why should I eat something that caused an animal to suffer when I could choose to buy something else? Rice milk wasn’t as good as milk, I thought, but it wasn’t bad enough to justify buying cow’s milk, which, as Ryan explained, came from an animal that was continually impregnated to maximize her dairy production, and her male calves were likely slaughtered for veal.
My decision to adopt a vegan diet was a very personal one. While I became increasingly concerned—and, later, outspoken—about the plight of animals raised on factory farms, I chose to adopt a vegan diet that day because I knew it was something I had the power to do, and I knew the choice was right for me. I loved Meat Fest as much as any of my friends, but I liked a lot of other foods, too. The way I saw it, when I sat down to eat, I could make a choice: I could eat the thing that I thought would taste best, or I could eat something perhaps slightly less delicious but that caused far less suffering. When I chose the latter, I felt good about myself—like in some small way I was making a difference.
I don’t think I substantially changed what I ate on a daily basis; I replaced the animal products I’d been eating with plant-based alternatives. Rice or soy milk on cereal, PB&J instead of ham and cheese, Earth Balance instead of butter, tofu and seitan instead of meat. Except for the occasional temptation—a tiny slice of brie, my grandmother’s matzo ball soup and coffee cake—I found that nearly everything I liked to eat could be replaced by a plant-based version of the same thing. Even when I tried a vegan product that tasted terrible, there was usually another brand that I found to be a little tastier. And, over time, vegan sour cream stopped tasting like, well, fake sour cream. Today, vegan sour cream tastes rich and creamy—a great topping for, or ingredient in, some of my favorite foods.
After a while, I stopped comparing the food I was eating as a vegan to the food I ate growing up. My tastes started to change. I had fewer cravings for rich and fatty foods, and I realized for the first time how sweet and satisfying whole foods can be. I started eating more fruits and nuts, used pure maple syrup as a sweetener instead of sugar, and added fresh spinach or kale to many of my favorite dishes. And, having never found a tofu scramble I really enjoyed, I invented my own.
My family was, by and large, supportive. My aunt Annie took me to a local bookstore to shop for vegan cookbooks and to read up on vegan nutrition. If my parents were cooking pasta with chicken for dinner, I’d just have my dad make me a serving without the chicken. If we were having tacos, I’d just have mine with beans, veggies, and salsa. Did I like beans as much as I liked ground beef and cheese? No. But it wasn’t bad, I still got to eat with my family, and I felt good about my choices. And by the time I got to college, most grocery stores had begun stocking various plant-based meat and dairy replacements.
Even my friends were supportive. I still attended Meat Fest, and a double veggie burger and fries became my new usual. When we’d have barbecues over the summer, I’d bring along a box of Boca Burgers, and it was like nothing had changed at all. Sure, people cracked jokes about it, but they were my friends. I didn’t object to what they ate and they didn’t object to what I ate. We all just made our own choices, and no matter what anybody said, I felt good about mine.
Looking back on it now, it’s amazing how little changed when I became vegan. It seems inconceivable that going from a meat eater one day to a vegan the next wouldn’t require a huge shift in a person’s life, but it certainly didn’t in mine. There was one major thing that changed, but it was a change I didn’t expect.
It never occurred to me that adopting a vegan diet would cause me to lose fifty pounds in two years, but that’s what happened. I lost the first twenty or so pounds before I left for college. People were beginning to notice that I was slimming down, but I didn’t notice a huge difference that first year until my mom took me shopping the summer before I left for my freshman year of college: I hadn’t worn a size medium shirt or a pair of pants with a 34-inch waist since I started high school.
The rest of the weight came off my freshman year, and that’s when the difference really became apparent. Gradually, over the course of that year, my body completely changed. My face looked slimmer, my waist leveled off at a size 32, and I even lost what my mother had always affectionately referred to as the “baby fat” on my hands.
Since the weight came off so slowly, it wasn’t until I went home for Christmas that year that I fully understood the extent of the changes. My friends and family couldn’t believe their eyes, and my grandmother found it rather unacceptable that I had yet to replace my new baggy clothes.
I didn’t get substantially more exercise or eat any less than I ate before: I just ate differently. I’m virtually the same weight today as I was in my sophomore year of college, when for the first time in my life I finally felt good about my body, because I’d made changes in my diet that made me feel good about myself.