There have been lots of great studies released showing the environmental advantages associated with veganism, but will a vegan diet help you lose weight as so many people claim?
Could a Vegan Diet Help You Lose Weight?
When losing bodyweight is your goal, but not to the point that you’re interested in fads and crash diets, it’s natural to start looking into potential healthy alternatives that can help you to reach your goal. For many, this means stumbling on many claims that a vegan diet will help you lose weight. But can you believe these claims? Is there any truth to them?
The answer isn’t likely as straightforward as you’re hoping. Can a vegan diet help you lose weight? Yes and no. It all depends on what you eat and how much of it you consume.
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A Recent Meta Analysis
Still, according to recent research, a vegan diet can help you lose weight if done properly. The study the newspaper was discussing ran for 12 weeks and involved the participation of people who were overweight or had type 2 diabetes. What they found was that the average participant did shed bodyweight while also lowering blood sugar levels.
The meta-analysis indicated that there is potential for a vegan diet to help you lose weight. Among the participants, the average person lost about 9 pounds across the three months of the study when compared with the control group. Blood sugar levels had also lowered. That said, there was no significant impact on cholesterol, triglyceride or blood pressure levels.
The participants whose data was studied in the meta-analysis were involved in 11 randomized trials, including 796 individuals with a BMI of at least 25 and were considered to be overweight, or who had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The results of this study were presented at the European Congress on Obesity.
A Vegan Diet Can Help You Lose Weight
The research was led by Anne-Ditte Termannsen of Copenhagen’s Steno Diabetes Centre. She concluded in the study published in the Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity journal that based on the meta-analysis results, veganism for at least 12 weeks, “may result in clinically meaningful weight loss and improve blood sugar levels, and therefore can be used in the management of overweight and type 2 diabetes.” She also went on to add that “Vegan diets likely lead to weight loss because they are associated with a reduced calorie intake due to a lower content of fat and higher content of dietary fibre.”
Of course, that’s where you need to be careful. There is, after all, lots of high-calorie, low-nutrition food available among your grocery store’s plant-based offerings. As with an omnivorous diet, the key to making sure a vegan diet can help you lose weight is to choose foods and portions that will keep your caloric intake within a range appropriate to your body’s healthy needs.
If veganism leads you to focus more on a diet of fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, legumes, and healthy fats in a proper balance, you might find that the switch will indeed help you to naturally reduce bodyweight. If the switch simply leads you to find plant-based alternatives to fast foods, processed meals, or other calorie-dense options that caused you to gain unwanted weight in the first place, you might not see the same bodyweight changes as you’re hoping.
