It’s a lifestyle, not a diet
Throughout this book, we’ve referred to the vegetarian diet, with “diet” being used in its original context – diet being your overall system of nourishing yourself. As a vegetarian, you’re changing your diet but you’re not on a diet, a significant difference. But they both come down to one thing – calories. A healthy diet, however, doesn’t involve counting calories and withholding food so the body starves. No, a healthy diet allows the body ample calories so that it every one of its functions hums along like a well-oiled machine, burning fuel as it goes along.
Calories are units of energy, like the gallons of gas you use to fuel your car. You consume calories when you eat, and your body burns the energy to fuel all the things that your body needs to do. Whether you’re running around the block or sitting on the couch watching television, your body is burning energy to keep your heart pumping, your lungs and kidneys functioning, your brain working and your muscles contracting.
The pace at which your body burns calories when at rest is called “basal metabolism.” That’s when you burn most of your calories, actually – when you’re sleeping or just sitting around. You burn them at a faster rate when you’re exercising and digesting food, but you basal metabolism determines how many calories you need to function, with the excess being stored as fat.
As you’re no doubt aware, some people have faster metabolisms, while others have sluggish metabolisms. Men usually have higher metabolisms than women,—they burn more calories than women because they have more muscle mass. People who exercise regularly can raise their metabolism, so they burn more calories even when they’re at rest.
Whatever the speed of the metabolism, though, it’s fuel is calories. Foods that have a lot of calories are loaded with fuel from protein, carbohydrates and fat. If you eat the same amount of calories that you need to fuel your body, you can maintain your ideal weight. Take in more calories than you burn, and you store the excess calories as fat. Weight loss occurs when you consume less calories than your body needs to burn for energy. Needing fuel, the body turns to the stored fat, breaking it down into usable energy. You can make this happen on purpose by either exercising – burning a lot of calories – or eating less.
As you’ll remember from previous chapters, our bodies are amazing evolutionary machines, designed to survive when there’s no food available. When you drastically cut back on the calories you eat, your body thinks that you’re in danger of starving and slows down your metabolism so that you aren’t burning as much energy. This is why most people on calorie-restrictive diets lose quickly at first and then slow down to a crawl – or plateau, at which point they aren’t losing at all even when they’re hardly eating anything at all.
Many people believe that exercise is the answer to boosting metabolism, but it’s only part of the equation. If you’re eating a very low calorie diet and exercising a lot, your body is still going to believe that it’s starving so the weight loss will be very, very slow. That’s not to say that exercise isn’t important – maintaining strong muscles helps you stay active and keeps you burning fat, no matter how slowly. But to keep your metabolism functioning well so that your body doesn’t go into starvation mode you still need to eat a moderate amount of calories, and finding the right balance can be frustrating to dieters to want to see big results quickly.
