Aussie VEGAN overweight, feeling disheartened 😔

sarahkay2007

I'm a 34 yo female vegan and I've put on 10 kilos in 6 months. It is so disheartening and I'm feeling quite defeated but motivated to lose it...just riddled with anxiety about how this has even happened. Any tips and advice would be lovely and encouragement too 😢 I am trying to eat less gluten as I love all the carbs and gluten but it tends to make me bloat and feel *kitten*. I'm tall and almost 80 kilos but I'm at my happiest and look my healthiest at around 64 kg. Please help 🙏🥲 New friends would mean a lot too

springlering62

I’m not vegan, so blow me off if necessary.

Did you recently become vegan? Did the weight gain start when you did?

There’s a misperception that being vegan or vegetarian are healthier and some people feel like they can eat anything they want within those parameters.

My daughter was vegan (began eating chicken during pregnancy, but otherwise still eats the same way.)

She is a fabulous vegan chef, and as an artist, also does a phenomenal of plating things up to look unbelievably tempting.

But, she uses a lot of coconut and other oils, does a lot of baking, and a lot of the nut-cheese etc substitutes. All are high in calories and fats.

You have to be very careful in the quantities you use. Just because they’re vegan, doesn’t mean they’re any more (or less) healthy than non-vegan foods.

Weight loss is all about CICO (calories in versus calories out), regardless of your personal way of eating.

Measuring weighing and logging carefully will show you where you may need to trim back or make substitutions. And that goes for anybody. Doing that was what opened my eyes to the caloric “cost” of the junk food I was scarfing down.

Also, calling on long time vegetarian @AnnPT77 who can give more effective advice than a moms observations. TIA, Ann. 😘

AnnPT77

@sarahkay2007, how this has happened for you is the same way it happens for anyone else: Some combination of fat gain and water retention that adds up to those 10 kilos in 6 months.

To the extent that some of it is fat, it's from eating more calories than the number of calories you burn up going about your life . . . everything from the calories needed for your heart to beat and your lungs to breath, to the effort you expend at work and home chores, plus any intentional exercise you may do on top of that.

If all of the 10 kilos was fat**, that would suggest you've been eating about 427 calories more daily on average than you're burning. That's not very hard to do, speaking from personal experience. That'd be around 1 peanut butter sandwich and a small glass of orange juice, as one example.

** Which is hard to assess without more information.

There's nothing special about being vegan/vegetarian in any of that, though. I'm not vegan, I'm vegetarian (and have been for over 48 years). I was a thin vegetarian, then a fat vegetarian, then an obese vegetarian, and stayed an obese vegetarian for over a decade while training and competing as an athlete. Then I got thin again, still a vegetarian. Body weight works for vegans and vegetarians the same way it works for anyone else.

There's nothing especially anti-weight-gain about a vegan diet, beyond the slight possibility that some individuals may end up choosing foods that are a little more filling thus harder to overeat. But heck, Oreo cookies are vegan, so that's not necessarily so. It's also not inherently true that vegan eating is always healthier than omnivorous eating, no matter what some advocacy sites may claim.

I started out losing weight around your current weight (I was 83 kilos), but needed to lose more (down to around 57 kilo area).

I did just what @springlering62 says above, log my food, use a food scale, count calories, hit my calorie goal most of the time. It worked great.

I didn't change my exercise routine (already active). I didn't change the range of foods I ate (just changed portion sizes, proportions on the plate, frequencies of some calorie-dense foods). I've been maintaining a healthy weight for 6+ years now the same way.

If you feel better eating fewer carbs and less gluten, by all means do that. But it won't matter to weight loss one way or the other: Body weight management is all about calorie balance between the calories we eat and the calories we burn.

It can be more nuanced than a simple equation, sure. Human bodies are dynamic. Calories in influences calories out. Nonetheless, any effect of food choice is indirect.

Calorie balance determines body weight. Food choice can have an indirect effect, by making us fatigued (so we burn fewer calories through resting more), or by leaving us fighting hunger/appetite (so we find it hard to stick to a reasonable calorie goal). The direct effect is still calories.

You can do this, with patience and some experimentation. This post is the best single on-ramp I know to using MFP to manage weight:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1080242/a-guide-to-get-you-started-on-your-path-to-sexypants/p1

Don't let the joke-y title put you off: It's solid, sensible, practical information.

Best wishes!

sagar_acid

Hey I am vegetarian and I have also put on around 25 kgs on my body...looking for support and friends...add me up