Okay, a few more nutshell thoughts here, more or less my own personal non-medical distillation of things I have been trying to read and understand for the last year or so.
-If weight loss is primary, or singular, on your list of goals, I don't think it's likely that you're going to see massive magical changes just from switching to a plant-based whole-foods diet, even if you do so pretty effectively. My suspicion is that most people who make the change end up making an implicit change in their calorie intake/burning, and I remain inclined to agree with most people that this is the principal underlying element of nearly all meaningful weight loss. Switching to a smarter plant based diet could well help you lose weight, but perhaps not much more than just counting calories and getting more exercise in a conventional (and maybe easier) sense. That's going to be an up-to-you deal, I think.
On that note - I finally got serious about calories within the last few months, and have seen a productive move on the scale while doing so. Some sort of discipline system (I'm using an web/app system called Lose It!) is the key for me, as it has helped me be more reticent to grab those six fruit juice-sweetened vegan cookies as a quick snack... not against the rules, but 300 calories I don't really need.
The *real* reason to make the big diet switch isn't to lose weight. It's to improve your overall health. I think we all have always understood at some level the general argument from every nutrition study -- it always goes like this:
if you eat less of this [bad food], your chance of [bad thing] drops by [some percentage]. Right? Okay, let's set aside the powerful evidence about cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, dementia, and allergies for a minute -- since while the evidence suggests that a plant-based diet helps all these, it's just a percentages game. Let's just focus on heart disease, our civilized country's number one killer and the massive driver in government and private costs on health care.
People who switch to this kind of diet can almost immediately make themselves essentially heart attack proof. You can get off your statins, your beta blockers, and your blood pressure medications. Nobody in this country has to die of a heart attack, and nobody needs to be in a debilitating long-term situation because of these maladies. If you believe you're just out of luck because it's in your family history, you're missing the point. Eat better, don't smoke, and that's pretty much it. It's just off-the-charts powerful.
I'm exactly the guy who is a candidate to have a heart attack before I'm out of my 40s, unless I get my act together. Incremental stuff -- less fatty food, more exercise, and so forth -- would all help. This switch in lifestyle and diet could mean much more than that.
-If you are interested in trying to eat more healthily overall, but not sold on completely eclipsing animal products from your diet, I'd recommend a look at this site:
Dr. Joel Fuhrman Improves Health - Lose Weight Naturally | Reverse Diabetes | Prevent Heart Disease and Cancer | Lower Cholesterol
He's the author of a best selling book
Eat To Live, and his basic pitch is to eat nutrient-dense foods as the foundation of your diet. He has a "holiday challenge" that asks participants to do several things for six weeks:
Quote:
Eat a large salad everyday
Enjoy a generous serving of steamed greens with mushrooms and onions
Satisfy my sweet tooth with three fruits a day
Have at least one fulfilling serving of beans each day
Avoid white flour
Avoid sugars & artificial sweeteners
Use oils sparingly
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There's honestly nothing on that list that is impossible to do. And his approach is basically that if you build a foundation like that (for me, that turns out to be something like 1000 calories a day, with <10g of fat and roughly 25-30g of protein) and remain reasonable with the rest of what you eat, you are going to land in a good place.
Signing up for the pledge to do it for 6 weeks gets you a free gold pass to his sit with a lot of other information and strategies. Incidentally, Fuhrman himself is plant-based arising from his own research, but he does not insist that his patients/followers completely eschew animal products (just get rid of most of them) -- so if you're looking for a rounded edge, there's an angle.
A very attractive thing about Fuhrman's approach is that if you switch to eating for nutrition (for lack of a clearer term), you can get to the point where you actually trust your body, and your hunger. He writes convincingly about "toxic hunger" as that feeling we get when we don't really need to eat but still want to... and a compelling pitch of his is that once you get out of eating garbage, your body will only be craving nutrients. So, when you're hungry, it's because you need to eat -- not because of the wide range of other reasons most of us hit the pantry once too often. I like that thinking, personally.
-If you're actually interested in learning more about the science behind this thinking, to me the best read on the topic has been
::: THE CHINA STUDY ::: , as mentioned above. I had already committed to dietary changes by the time I actually read it myself, but I have since bought a gift copy for five or six friends (people who have expressed interest, I'm not trying to proselytize to every audience).
Watching the documentary "Forks Over Knives" is obviously a quick test of whether you're open to the ideas. It's well done, but it's abbreviated and simplified by necessity. However, you get a glimpse at the super strong connections between the modern diet and so many health problems that it at least can be an eye opener.
From there, there are a lot of directions to go. One I find approachable is the
Engine 2 Diet, another best seller from bookstores and now being promoted at Whole Foods groceries. Pitch there is a group of Texas firefighters engaged in a plant-based challenge, and saw all their measurable health conditions improve massively, leaving nearly all of them permanent converts. The book is a combination rah-rah with a somewhat male-oriented slant, and then a decent series of recipes (most of them pretty reliable).