Vegan-EASE?

GingerZnapp

Hey y'all! I've got Type 2 Diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and need to lose 50 pounds. I am on at least 7 medications -- some of which are solely to counteract negative side effects from the others -- plus various supplements. I've recently received counsel from a friend that I should go Vegan. The studies leave little doubt that this is the best option if I plan to remain alive. Looking here for support, advice, friends in general. The struggle is real, folks!

AnnPT77

Have you checked out the Happy Herbivores group here? It's not super active lately, but there's still some pretty recent posts, lots of vegan members, and a wealth of posts (including some older ones) with tips, eating ideas, etc. Here's a direct link:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/45-happy-herbivores

For nutritional advice, this site (run by registered dietitians who are vegans) is excellent:

https://veganhealth.org/

It's very science-based, which is great. IME, there are way too many vegan advocacy sites that want to encourage people to become vegan for ethical/moral reasons - perfectly valid motivations, BTW - but who are willing to misrepresent sound nutritional science in order to make converts. The folks who run the site above are more level-headed.

I'm a skeptic of the advice you're getting to convert to veganism, to be honest. (And I'm not a shill for Big Meat: I've been vegetarian for 47+ years.) Most people (statistically speaking) would be better off eating lots more veggies and fruits, but cutting out meat/fish makes getting good nutrition a tiny bit more difficult, and social life ditto. It's not a bad thing, but it's not essential for health.

These days, the web has a lot of advocacy information so if we search for "is veganism good for XYZ condition", we'll get a lot of hits and support for that idea. Approached from the other side, looking at sources of nutritional expertise about condition XYZ, that advice is less common, and typically more nuanced.

I'm saying that as someone who formerly had high blood pressure, high cholesterol/triglycerides, and obesity (needed to lose about 50 pounds, coincidentally). I now have solidly normal blood pressure, consistently good cholesterol/triglycerides numbers, and have been at a healthy weight for 6+ years (without medications to do those things - the only prescription I take is thyroid hormone, because I'm severely hypothyroid - have been for 20+ years).

I've not been diabetic, but I would expect veganism to complicate the most common advice to diabetics, which involves managing carb levels. Many good sources of plant protein are relatively high in carbohydrates.

For sure, plant-based eating, by itself, doesn't assure weight loss. Admittedly, I'm vegetarian, not vegan, but much of what I eat is plant-sourced. That was true when I was thin in my 20s, as I got fat in my 30s, became obese in my 40s, then finally lost weight at 59-60. (Ditto for "eating healthy": I've been whole-grain-y, negligible fast food intake, etc., that whole time, too. It's easy enough to overeat healthy foods, though they do tend to feel more filling when a person first shifts to them, which can be an aid to initial weight loss.)

Veganism, technically, is a whole lifestyle that minimizes exploitation of animals. That is, vegans stop wearing leather, buy products that guarantee no animal testing, some won't eat honey, etc. It's possible to do fully plant-based eating without being officially vegan, of course.

Whatever you decide, wishing you great success in losing weight, managing your multiple health conditions, and generally thriving!

jwoolman5

You can ease into vegan eating (and you do not have to go along with any orthodox agenda) to see how it works for you. At least reducing reliance on meat and fish as protein sources will bring in more plant-based options to try. Our protein needs are not as drastic as many carnivores assume and easy to meet on a normal vegan diet.

Type 2 diabetes seems to be primarily a disorder of insulin resistance. You may not have to worry so much about the complex carbohydrates in a healthy vegan diet, just meeting usual guidelines may not be as hard as some think. There are a lot of low-carbohydrate foods in a vegan diet, and higher-carb foods can just be eaten in lesser amounts if needed.

But your pancreas is working in Type 2 diabetes, the problem seems to be that the cells are shutting off entrance of insulin with its cargo of sugar from the blood and the pancreas is actually working overtime on churning out more insulin in response. You might find avoiding too many insulin surges by not eating too often to be a successful strategy. Just making sure that there are long enough periods of not eating (so-called “intermittent fasting”, but it doesn’t have to be drastic) has helped many to normalize their bodies’ use of insulin.

You might look for videos and articles/books by Jason Fung, a Canadian nephrologist who has treated many diabetics and has a lot of suggestions for how to deal with insulin resistance. He says all the info in his books is available for free on his website and videos, so no $ needed. He says any dietary approach works for weight loss if you just don’t eat all the time.... So he has good explanations about how to do that today.

Fung is definitely right that back in the less obesity-prone 1950s, we just weren’t snacking as much as today. I lived through it. We were supposed to get what we needed at meals, mostly. Now children and adults have food pushed at them much more frequently. Nobody thought we needed a snack while playing sports back then. Every time you eat protein or carbohydrate, that triggers insulin release by the pancreas and too much of that seems to mess up the natural process of getting sugar from the blood into the cells where it belongs.

Anyway: Eating more beans and less animal food should help reduce dietary cholesterol, although most of our cholesterol is actually synthesized in our bodies. I wouldn’t count on a vegan diet to make you slim, there are other factors at work. What you eat and how much still counts, but a plant-based diet with minimal vegan junk food might be a helpful reset. But even just aiming for mostly vegan eating on a gradual schedule should help encourage you to eat more foods that we know help us stay healthy, which includes normalizing our appetites to match our activity level.

I’ve eaten mainly vegan for decades (vegetarian allergic to dairy and egg) and use a food tracker to record what I eat (among other useful things like if a cat is inside or outside) and it’s really hard to not get enough protein if you eat a variety of plant foods. But actually experimenting for yourself will show you if that’s true for you. We are not obligate carnivores, just optional ones, so our bodies are built to be quite sustainable on other food sources. But growing up in a meat-centered culture, we don’t always know how to eat properly from plant sources. So it might take some time for you to figure out what works best for you.