Does Being Vegetarian cause Major Weight Loss
By Mark on Feb 5, 2008 in Diets
Does being vegetarian necessarily mean that you are going to lose lots of weight, myself I am not a vegetarian but according to a study that has been conducted it does seem to be the case from what they say, overall vegetarians are slimmer than their meat-eating counterparts.
The Facts
Vegetarians health tends to be better than people who eat meat, and they don’t suffer from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and any other diseases which tend to be linked with being overweight, this study however to me seems to make some very bold claims it says that you can achieve weight loss without having to do any exercise which to me seems a bit outlandish to say the least.
The information was compiled from 87 other studies done in the past, obesity is now skyrocketing especially in western civilisations where fast-food joints, are in abundance and as collective nations we are eating more food than ever before.
Overall the weight of vegetarians compared to their meat-eating companions, tends to be quite a big difference, in comparison this is between three and 20% less than somebody who does eat meat, now here’s the part that to me seems quite hard to believe they say that a low-fat vegan diet will help you lose one pound of fat per week, without exercising and doing anything else this also includes not controlling the amount of portions that you eat.
From what they say you can eat unlimited amounts of fruit and vegetables regardless of portion sizes without gaining weight, it goes on to say that the food eaten in a vegetarian diet helps with the fat burning process, also eating vegetables helps with insulin resistance instead of the food being stored as fat it tends to get taken up by the cells and burnt off hence no weight gain.
A team of researchers found that by switching to a vegetarian diet over a period of five years the participants did in fact gain less weight, in another study of 55,000 women found that the ones that ate meat were far more likely to be overweight than those people whom didn’t eat meat.
My Thoughts
Here are my thoughts on this I myself have never tried becoming a vegetarian or vegan for that matter, I was in a relationship once with someone who was a vegetarian and she never seemed to put on any weight perhaps it’s something I could try for a month to see what happens.
I’ll keep you updated on my progress although I must admit I think I will find it quite hard, to switch to eating vegetables and fruit etc. Mind you it would be interesting overall experiment to see what exactly did happen, I could do weekly updates just to see how I feel what difference it makes and so on.
In a post I wrote earlier this week about a program called eat to save your life which was hosted by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, they actually got some sausage meat and put it through a mincer so you could see what came out of it surprisingly there is more fat in sausages than there used to be compared to nowadays, they took a few selections of meat and you could see that today’s farming methods do in fact leave more fat on the meat.
Even chickens are bred this way when you actually look at a chicken it’s hard to tell how much is lean meat and how much isn’t, put on a supermarket shelf you tend to see quite a big piece of chicken which seems good value for money.
This gives the consumer a feeling of that they are getting more for their money when in fact in reality they are not, quite a while back now I wrote a post called how to beat supermarket psychology, in that post there are two videos based around how supermarkets do things, in one of them they actually liquidise a chicken and separate the fat off so you can actually see how much fat there is in a chicken compared to days gone by.
If anybody would like to put forward their argument or point you view regarding this I would be very interested to hear from you do you know anybody who is vegetarian and maintains constant weight ? and you a meat eater and is it harder to lose weight if you are one, comments and thoughts are always welcome please feel free to leave yours.
Tags: Exercise, obesity, vegan, vegetarian
5 Comment(s)
By Jennifer on Feb 9, 2008 | Reply
I would like to say that I have a friend that’s a vegetarian and he’s FAT! He doesn’t eat meat at all but he is a little on the heavy side. I’m saying, just because you don’t eat animal products doesn’t mean you’re eating healthy. I personally have seen him stuff a few doughnuts in his mouth and none-the-less, I question his vegetarian status but his excuse is that it’s not animal. Obvously it isn’t but what if the oil that it was cooked in came from an animal. I think that defeats the whole purpose of being a vegetarian. I personally love meat and I’m currently doing a weight-loss challenge. I challenged myself to lose 40lbs in 4 months. I’m currently down 30 lbs in two months. Check out my blog to track my results: http://howilossweight.blogspot.com.
Keep the good blogs coming!
By JoLynn Braley on Feb 10, 2008 | Reply
Hi Mark,
I’ve known some vegetarians that weren’t all that fit, in fact they ate a lot of bread, not so many fruits and veggies.
I’ll have to see if I can get Eat To Save Your Life here in the States. Do you watch You Are What You Eat? I love that show, I’ve been taping tons of episodes and I keep watching them over and over, Gillian is the best. You know what’s interesting is she doesn’t say that she suggests being vegetarian, but that’s how she has the folks eat… and they lose a lot of weight. They aren’t eating bread, though.
By Mark on Feb 11, 2008 | Reply
Hi Jennifer I can see our point on this and vegetarians can eat the wrong food so it defeats the object I know it’s nice however to get feedback and thanks for dropping by.
Mark
By Mark on Feb 11, 2008 | Reply
Hi Jo yes I do watch your are what you eat, I think it depends what kind of bread you eat I used to eat a lot of white bread but stopped eating it and only eat wholemeal due to the high fiber content.
Thanks for the feedback
Mark
By Colon Cleanse Geek on Mar 26, 2008 | Reply
Most vegetarians lose weight b/c of the high amount of fat in meat/poultry …etc. Hence the weight loss when a person changes a diet. Some vegetarians still will gain weight if they begin to change their diet by consuming simple carbohydrates and high fat foods to make up for the loss of animal protein.