Many people adopt a vegan diet with the sole objective of losing weight. And it is true, a vegan diet certainly results in you tracking towards an ideal weight for your height, muscle structure, and lifestyle.
If you are overweight, it largely comes down to the fact you have a set of inconsistent beliefs. You believe that you need to habitually consume certain foods each day, and move a certain amount. Then you subconsciously act in accordance with your beliefs. Add to this billions of dollars’ worth of international marketing trying to convince you that you will have the perfect body (just like some top athlete in the photograph) if you will just drink this brand of beer, eat this brand of doughnuts, regularly gorge yourself on this brand of takeaways, and consume massive amounts of these energy drinks. The net result is that you end up with a false set of beliefs.
To break this cycle, you need to establish a new set of beliefs that are consistent with your health and weight objectives, and you need to discipline yourself to act on these beliefs until they become your new habitual responses.
When you follow a vegan diet, you immediately start questioning the ingredients of every food item before it goes in your mouth. Questioning what you are fueling your body with is a very good idea regardless of whether you are following a vegan diet. The vegan philosophy provides you a compete set of consistent beliefs and eating habits that will trend you to the ideal body shape for you.
The profitability of selling food to people is largely related to how processed the food is. The more the food is processed, the higher the profit margins. This is why the vast majority of supermarket floor space is dedicated to processed food. Processed food is high profit for three reasons. Firstly, consumers believe it would be difficult or time consuming for them to create the item. Secondly, the consumer can be educated to pay far more than the cost of the raw ingredients. And thirdly, processed food has a long shelf life so the supermarket rarely has to throw away stock that did not sell before its use-by date. To make the food last indefinitely on the supermarket shelf, preservatives are added.
One of the cheapest and most freely available preservatives is sugar. Sugar is really good at killing bugs (and other life forms). If you are miles from anywhere and you cut yourself badly, and you have no other alternative treatment available, put a handful of sugar on the wound and wrap it up in a bandage. This will help you survive your trip to hospital ( https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180328-how-sugar-could-help-heal-wounds ). Note very carefully we are not giving medical advice here. The takeaway message we want you to absorb is ‘sugar is really good at killing stuff’. It also tastes really nice.
As you start reading the ingredient labels on food before you buy it, it is a good idea to avoid anything with added sugar. But beware, you are walking into a marketing battlefield. Conning you into eating sugar is a multi billion-dollar industry and they are not going to take it lying down when you decide to avoid it. The first thing the sugar industry has done is rename sugar. In the ingredient list on processed food sugar may be called any of: Agave nectar, Barbados sugar, Barley malt, Barley malt syrup, Beet sugar, Brown sugar, Buttered syrup, Cane juice, Cane juice crystals, Cane sugar, Caramel, Carob syrup, Castor sugar, Coconut palm sugar, Coconut sugar, Confectioner’s sugar, Corn sweetener, Corn syrup, Corn syrup solids, Date sugar, Dehydrated cane juice, Demerara sugar, Dextrin, Dextrose, Evaporated cane juice, Free-flowing brown sugars, Fructose, Fruit juice, Fruit juice concentrate, Glucose, Glucose solids, Golden sugar, Golden syrup, Grape sugar, HFCS (High-Fructose Corn Syrup), Honey, Icing sugar, Invert sugar, Malt syrup, Maltodextrin, Maltol, Maltose, Mannose, Maple syrup, Molasses, Muscovado, Palm sugar, Panocha, Powdered sugar, Raw sugar, Refiner’s syrup, Rice syrup, Saccharose, Sorghum Syrup, Sucrose, Sugar (granulated), Sweet Sorghum, Syrup, Treacle, Turbinado sugar, Yellow sugar, to name a few ( https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/hidden-in-plain-sight/#.XwPChS1h0W8 ).
When you eat a piece of fruit it has sugar in it, but it also has a lot of fiber which satisfies your hunger and makes you feel full. This means when you eat an apple you enjoy the taste, and you feel full. It is very difficult (and unhealthy) to eat ten apples in one sitting. If you put them into a food blender and juice them, then it becomes easy to eat them all in one sitting because you have destroyed the fiber. It is still unhealthy because there is a massive amount of sugar in ten apples. Fruit juice is just as full of sugar as any other processed drink (the healthiest drink is water, get used to it and you will realize how beautiful it really tastes).
Eating a vegan diet has four major health benefits. You are likely eating more natural food. You are eating less food because the natural water and fiber content in fresh food satisfies in a way processed food cannot. You are avoiding many unhealthy aspects of eating dead animals. And you are avoiding all the chemicals and hormones that are required to economically produce dead animals into the food supply chain.
We have not tried to cover all the weight loss benefits of a vegan diet here. You can find those out really quickly just by converting to a vegan diet. The bottom line we are communicating here is that if you strictly follow a vegan diet, you are most likely going to start eating in very healthy manner, and you are going develop the healthy body type that is so prevalent among vegans.
One final caveat. Don’t become a ‘pudding vegan’! A ‘pudding vegan’ is a person that just stops eating meat and continues to eat all the rubbish that meat eaters’ stuff into their mouths.