Low Carb

funnylilgoose

Hi there. Thoughts on low carb lifestyle? It seems I’ve had the best success with that since going off BC. Following low carb, I was able to lose some of the weight I’ve gained since going off BC. I follow a vegan lifestyle and would like to eat more holistically within that realm, instead of focused on low carb, but I don’t lose weight, even while working out regularly. Thank you.

Xerogs

I've had some success with the recipes in The Vegan Ketogenic Diet cookbook. I've gotten a couple freebie vegan cookbooks over the years and the recipes weren't that good but this one is OK. For me vegan low carb weight loss is slow so I just have to be patient.

AnnPT77

If not losing on average over a multi-week period, like 4-6 weeks, whole menstrual cycles for adult women, the most likely explanation is about calories, not eating style. Going low carb tends to make people drop water weight at first, which feels like success, but there's ample research showing that equal calorie diets that are higher-carb/lower-fat or higher-fat/lower-carb end up in the same amounts of fat loss over time, as long as protein levels are equated.

If stopping BC is relatively recent, or moving away from low carb is relatively recent, or you've increased exercise, or something similar, you may simply be at a stage where water weight shifts are masking fat loss on the scale. It happens, because bodies are weird. This would be a good read on the subject, if you haven't seen it before:

https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations

I'm not vegan, but I've been vegetarian for 47+ years, thin to fat to obese and back to thin again. At every stage, I ate and eat plenty of carbs. While losing about a third of my body weight, I ate maybe 150g or so of carbs daily, nowadays (in year 6+ of maintaining a healthy weight), I eat 225g+ of carbs most days. That presents no weight management problem, for me.

Plant-based eating has no weight loss magic, either, based on my experience. Weight management is all about calories. Nutrition is important for health, of course. Omnivores or plant-based eaters can all get good nutrition.

By the way, the reason protein levels need to be equated to compare high fat vs. high carb diets is that protein has a higher TEF (requires more energy to metabolize than carbs or fat). How's your protein intake? Obviously, I'm not silly enough to believe that plant based eating implies not getting enough protein, because I get plenty of my protein from plant sources. Getting enough of it can be helpful for anyone - besides the TEF thing, many people find it filling, though not all, and it's important for body composition (muscle maintenance/repair/growth).

Are you food logging and calorie counting? If so, it'd help to know how many calories you're eating, what your height/weight/age are, whether you're eating back exercise calories and if so how you estimate them, what your logging methods are (eyeballing, cups/spoons, food scale kind of thing). If you open your diary here, even temporarily, some of the experienced folks could take a look, see if any common logging issues jump out. That's not a criticism: If new to counting, logging can be a somewhat subtle skill, and it takes any of us time to develop it.

Best wishes!