Just_eat_vegetables!

They're so low on calories that it costs your body more calories to metabolize the vegetables than the calories they put into your body.

Really? .. Prove it

LOL I see now where I goofed up. The way I worded that post made it look like I was saying you should only eat 2 cups of vegs a day or just go entirely vegan. That's my bad and I want to clear this up:

I've been tracking my caloric intake for 2 years now. I've gone as far as exactly duplicating my diet--as in breakfast, lunch and dinner for several weeks in a row and then weighing in every 7 days to see how much my weight was affected.

I'm 5'9", 39 years old and currently 208 lbs. Yeah I slipped but hey, I wear the weight well LOL.

So anyway when I was seriously dieting in 2012 and I wound up losing 28 lbs in a little over 90 days--roughly a couple pounds a week, which is plenty healthy. But the way I went about it was by following a strict low calorie diet that was around 1500 calories a day. It was EXTREMELY difficult. I was always hungry and a little grouchy during that time.

But I learned from it as well. Towards the end of it I found it that from week to week, if I ate 1600 calories a day, 100 more than my goal, AND ate either 2 cups of vegetables or a can of vegetables for ONE meal a day, I lost 3 pounds a week. Sometimes more.

I understand that losing 3 or more pounds a week is considered unhealthy but it definitely opened my eyes. If people want to say vegs burning calories is a myth, I really don't care. All I know how it affected MY body and MY weight. And believe me, I logged my meals and weight and tracked it very carefully.

To sum up I'm not saying you should only eat vegetables. In my experience you don't have to. You can eat "fun" food and stay under your caloric budget. But in MY experience, eating a medium-sized portion of plain vegetables every day dropped my weight faster than by just maintaining a normal weight-reducing caloric budget.

And here's something else to think about. In 2014, a high percentage of Americans are considered obese. I don't know what our average weight was in 1814, but I'd be willing to bet our great-great grandparents were eating alot less bread and beef in those days.

Think about the amount of work that goes into that hamburger pattie in a Big Mac--from the time that baby calf was born to the day it wound up in a little bag at the drive-thru window at McDonald's. It hasn't always been this easy and cheap to procure a beef pattie. The same goes for bread--from grain harvested in the field to the bun on your plate.

Now compare that to the effort that goes into growing and preparing vegetables. A little old lady can plant vegetables in her backyard, pick them and throw them into a pot to eat. That's nothing compared to the work that went into the preparation of meat and bread throughout most of human history. Beef and bread have never been as accessible(in American anyway) at any point in our prior history.

When scientists perform an experiment they look at variables. Today we do so little manual labor and pay so little for so many calories that beef and bread contain and it has radically changed from what it was even 100 years ago. That's a MAJOR variable.

Try it.