CHAPTER 10 - Balancing the Scales - Losing Weight on a Vegetarian Diet
Americans spend over $30 billion each year on weight control products, programs, gym memberships and gizmos. And yet, 25 percent of Americans are overweight, with about half the women on weight-loss diets. The industries that make Americans fat, slim them down, and then fatten them up again – from the supersized fast-food corporations to the “systems” that are really just packaged food purveyors – get rich by advising people to eat irresponsibly. They’re abetted by government agencies like the FDA and the USDA, which still promote their meat and carbohydrate heavy food pyramid while chiding everyone for getting so fat.
The diet industry rakes in the enormous profits that it does for one simple, yet ingenious, reason – the diets they promote don’t work. Whether it’s meal replacement shakes, prepackaged microwave meals, appetite suppressing pills or the elimination of one major nutrient category (usually fat or carbohydrates), they all have one thing in common. That is, that while they’re designed to take off weight in the short term, they aren’t a lifestyle that you can adapt for the rest of your life. Sooner or later (usually as soon as about half the weight you wanted to lose has melted away) you go back to eating real food instead of shakes, pills, bars or boxed dinners, and the weight all comes back. Then you pronounce that diet a failure and jump on a different one!
This merry-go-round makes the diet industry very happy, and they’re thrilled when a new fad comes along that they can exploit. When it was diet shakes, a hundred companies made diet shakes. When the boxed-meal diets became popular, five more “programs” opened franchises. The same company that was making low-fat meal replacement bars five years ago also turned out low-carb bars when the Atkins diet was all the rage – and switched back to making low-fat bars as soon as the fad started to fade. If the next big fad turns out to be an all-fish diet, you can bet those same companies will be manufacturing Cod Munchies and Halibut Delight Cookies.
The secret to successful weight control – the secret that the diet industry doesn’t want you to figure out – is eating a moderate amount of a variety of nutrient-rich foods. Because if you’re eating whole foods, there’s nothing for them to sell you! And the ideal weight control diet is a vegetarian diet. Vegetarians are, overall, thinner than meat-eaters, despite eating everything that the diet programs forbid.
Rethinking the concept of dieting
Going by conventional wisdom, it doesn’t make sense that vegetarians can be slender when they eat potatoes, pasta, bread, beans and rice. Which is the first clue that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Popular fad diets insist that starchy foods will pack on the pounds, and insist that you limit carbohydrates to a small green salad and maybe one piece of fruit each day. But vegetarianism is a naturally slenderizing diet, and one that makes sense when you understand just how it fuels the body.
If you want to lose weight permanently and stay off fad diets forever, the first step is to jettison everything that the diet gurus have told you. Starvation diets – and really, that what all fad diets are – don’t keep weight off in the long term.
A realistic diet is one that contains whole, healthful foods and doesn’t involve buying special products and supplements. You don’t need to count calories or “points” or talk to a diet counselor every week. You just need to change the way you eat, replacing bad old habits with good new ones.
Face it – if you’re fat, it’s because of the way you eat. And the only way to change that is to revamp your diet and have some patience. It took a long time to gain all that weight, and it’s going to take a long time to get it off. If you want to lose weight and keep it off for the rest of your life, you have to find a way of eating that you can live with even after you’re at your ideal weight. There are no quick fixes – not if you want permanent results.
