Reddit reviews 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health

This! The people reducing weight loss to calories in/out are just sticking their fingers in their ears because they don't wanna hear it when it comes to veganism. Also as someone who used to be 200 pounds (now 150), writing off the benefits of veganism and chanting 'its just muh calories in/ calories out!' is utterly ridiculous. Yes calories in/out is the basic mechanism which determines losing body fat. It is NOT the only component of a successful weight-loss diet!


How's a person going to lose weight if they feel hungry all the time? Satiety is an important factor in what makes a diet sustainable, which veganism addresses with tendencies towards low caloric density veggies, an abundance of fiber, and cuts out calorically dense foods like animal fats and meats that don't fill you up as much on more calories. Keto, for instance, does this by making body fat easier for your body to use for energy so you don't feel as much of a need to eat. How's a person going to lose weight if they keep having cravings? The glycemic index/load of foods you eat can cause spikes in blood sugar, which can lead to insulin problems and then a crash in blood sugar levels that leads you to crave more. Low carb diets in general are successful for a lot of people where calorie-counting isn't because they address this factor. For me I guess I had a particularly sensitive glycogen response, as once I started consciously avoiding anything with a high GI I literally just naturally went from eating 4 to 3 meals a day! I'd get intense hunger pains (sometimes so bad I'd feel nauseous) after just 1.5-2 hours of eating that were just gone! Then there's the effect of lipids on the metabolism - aside from fats being calorically dense to begin with they also thicken the blood and can impair the efficiency of mitochondria. This is how I assume low-fat diets can succeed for some where just calorie counting does not.


These are all things I've learned as I've experimented with weight loss diets to find what works for me, and if someone reading this needs a source I highly recommend this book by Dr. Neal Barnard, the first third of which is sourced and in-depth explanations of numerous of these other factors, how they impact general health, and how they can hijack the success of a weight loss diet. It includes veganism as a part of it and is specifically focused on fulfilling these other factors well enough that calorie counting is simply not necessary. It changed my life, and it's got plenty of evidence that there's more to weight loss than just calorie counting. That's why what's dismissed as 'fad' diets can sometimes be the only diet that genuinely works for people.


This is not 'pseudo-science', far from it. If more people who didn't know what they were talking about stopped trying to reduce the complexity of the human digestive system to a number then it would've saved me years of self-loathing when I had to eat if I wanted to sleep (hunger pains were just that bad that I NEEDED to either eat or lay awake starving, often for hours when I did try). Quite frankly, OP is ignorant, the people who he's upset we don't appease are also ignorant, and while those arguing against them may come off as ignorant to people who don't know all these complexities of weight loss that's no behaviour we should cease just so the cause looks better to them. I also doubt some of them would be as quick to dismiss if it were something like low-carb that allows animal produce.


Sorry if this ended up ranty but it really upsets me because of how much grief this attitude towards weight loss has caused me.

I personally didn't search for a meal plan when I started, but realized afterwards that there are actual doctors and nutritionist who have redacted really good plans already, I'll give you a couple and you can search anything you want from there :)

Dr. Neal Barnar'ds 21- Day Weight Loss Kickstart (there are also recommended cookbocks by the same author),

Based on Dr. John McDougall's books, her wife wrote The new McDougall Cookbook.

If you want to get fancy, veganeasy.com has a 30 Day Menu.

Remember that most people cycle over 6-9 meals, and you can adapt any recipe, I currently cook for 20-30 mins every three days, you'll get the handle of it :).

Good luck!

The 21 Day Kickstart by Neal Barnard - Just finished it. It's a relatively short, very straightforward guide to transition to WFPB and is really approachable. He baby-steps people into into in the WFPB diet, gives them shortcuts they can use (canned beans, how to veganise and reduce fat on common restaurant items) and makes it less daunting. It's not super-strict so it's not overwhelming, and it's about 90% WFPB compliant. (He mentions that you can use small amounts of vegan, low fat ready-to-eat things found in supermarkets like condiments, even if they have a bit of sugar. But not a tonne.) Anyway, I think this is what I'll start recommending to people who have just started looking into the diet as a way to not completely overwhelm them by saying 'NEVER EAT A DROP OF OIL OR A GRAM OF SUGAR AGAIN!'

He also spoonfeeds some of the science behind the diet in small sections that are easier to read and understand if you're not super into delving deep into the trenches of research.

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EDIT: There's also a free website around this approach. https://kickstart.pcrm.org/