It’s Not the Quantity, it’s the Quality

Weight loss diets for omnivores usually involve restricting something—fat, carbohydrates, or calories. These diets are great for losing weight quickly. But most people gain weight back after their initial weight loss for two reasons: their diet isn’t something they can stay on for the rest of their lives, and extreme diets ultimately slow the metabolism.

Let’s face it. Anyone can lose weight by cutting back on the amount of food they eat. It’s called starvation! If you’ve ever been on a severely restrictive diet and felt cranky, light-headed, and low on energy, it’s because your body wasn’t getting the nutrients it needed. Burning stored fat is, of course, necessary for weight loss, but there are a lot of other things that you need from the food you eat just to get through the day. And eventually, restrictive diets actually have the result of making you fat.

Our bodies were ingeniously designed to survive in times of famine. When the eating’s good, we store extra energy in the form of fat for later use. When the pickings are slim, however, and we’re eating less than we need to survive, our bodies kick on the emergency backup system and burn the stored fat for energy. This worked brilliantly when man foraged for his food and ate whatever he could find—when he went for long periods with nothing to eat, he got thinner but he didn’t die because of the stored fat reserves.

Your body does the same thing, even though you aren’t foraging for food and going through long periods of famine. Every time you go on a restrictive diet, your body thinks that it’s starving. So your metabolism slows down, burning less energy and keeping you alive in the face of starvation. When you try to go back to eating normally your body leaps at the chance to store fat for the next time starvation comes, so you gain weight even faster than before. Your metabolism is slower, so you have less energy you’re less inclined to exercise, and your body holds onto what you give it for even longer.

So what’s the solution? Eat healthy foods, in moderation, to keep your metabolism chugging along like a well-oiled machine. And stay away from the junk food—just because those chocolate-covered granola bars and cheese puffs are meat-free, that doesn’t mean they’re good dietary choices.

Now that you’ve successfully given up eating animal protein, take this opportunity to pick up other good habits too. Drink water instead sodas loaded with sugar (or aspartame). Satisfy your sweet tooth with fresh fruit instead of candy, eat whole-grain baked foods instead of white bread, and start using rice milk instead of dairy. Your body will thank you!

Feeling Good, Looking Good

There’s truth to the adage, “you are what you eat.” Once you start fueling your body with healthful foods, it’ll show on the outside!

Take, for example, your skin. It’s the body’s largest organ and takes up about 12 percent of your body weight; it’s also the first thing you present to the world. Your skin is alive—it breathes and needs moisture and the right nutrients to keep it not just blemish-free, but glowing and attractive. And it’s arguably your most important organ of all; it keeps your muscles, organs, and bones protected from the elements.

The old, dry top layer of your skin sloughs off and is replaced every day or two. When you damage your skin, your body’s system of self-repair is remarkable—you get a cut or scrape, and blood flows into the wound to flush out any foreign particles. Then your white blood cells go to work to fight infection, and nutrients like zinc and calcium kick in to build new skin cells to repair the damage. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

You can repay all the good things your skin does for you by feeding it foods rich in the nutrients it craves. All plant foods contain a substance called bioflavinoids, which give plants’ cells the solid structure they need. In the human body, bioflavinoids serve the same general purpose of nourishing the cells of your blood vessels. When these blood vessels, called capillaries, weaken and break, they leak blood and cause spider veins. These reddish splotches can appear anywhere on your body, particularly your cheeks, nose, and legs. By eating foods rich in bioflavinoids, you’ll help to keep your blood vessels strong. Besides spider veins, weak blood vessels also lead to a variety of circulatory problems, including the tendency to bruise easily.

When it comes to looking your best, healthy skin is of vital importance. As an organ, one of skin’s most important functions is to eliminate waste products through your perspiration. As with urine, the moisture that passes out of your body when you sweat carries with it the end product of the nutrients you didn’t need for your bodily functions. Animal products contain very concentrated protein; when excess protein is filtered through the body, whatever your kidneys can’t handle makes its way out of your body through your sweat. Some of it clogs your pores, making your skin dry and flaky and creating blemishes.

By eating a vegetarian diet, you won’t be making your kidneys work so hard, you’ll have less impurities passing through your skin, and you’ll help the blood flow freely through your blood vessels. That glow of good health is the mark of a vegetarian!