Weight Plateau on Plant Based Diet
What if there was a way to break through a weight-loss plateau and keep the weight off in a healthy way, without having to think about it all the time or work at it constantly?
It's exhausting and frustrating to have one diet after another fail or stall before you reach your destination. Especially when you know you want to eat a healhty diet and you even know what to eat but you keep failing anyway.
I speak from experience after struggling with my weight and diet for nearly 30 years. Ironically I discovered that by eating more food and changing when and how I eat was as important as what I was eating.
There is some truth to "eat more weigh less"
Forget portion control calorie counting and "using smaller dishes". You can enjoy eating without fear of weight gain once you make a few minor adjustments .
There are a lot of fad diets that help you lose weight rapidly for a little while because they remove processed foods from your diet. I have tried at least a dozen.
Inevitably, you hit a plateau after a few weeks of dramatic weight loss, and you may even begin to regain the weight. But with a few simple tweeks you can stop failing with your nutrition goals and get back to living your life.
In this guide to overcoming a weight loss plateau Learn how to:
- Eat more food and lose more weight: It sounds crazy, but you might be under eating
- Eat the same amount but eat at a different time to lose up to 200 more calories per day
- Simple tricks for turning off cortisol and burn more fat all day
- How Intermittant fasting and OMAD can help and hinder your nutrition goals
- Chooose the right carbs for weight loss
- Eat the right fats in t he right amounts for your body
- know much protien is enough?
- Smoothies and powders could slow your weight loss
When you eat is as important as what you eat
We tend to focus on what we eat, and that is important. But it turns out you can eat the exact same foods but eat them at different times of the day and cut down on your fat absorption by as much as 200 calories a day .
A clinical study found that if you have your heaviest meal early in the day and your lightest meal in the evening you can naturally burn more calories.
Our metabolism naturally slows down toward the evening as we get into resting mode. Ironically this is when we tend to eat our heaviest meal.
And on top of having the biggest meal at the end of the day we make it worse by snacking while watching TV or sitting in front of the computer after dinner.
Just changing this one habit and eating less at night could speed up your fat burning without even changing what you eat.
Related Articles and Resources:
- Plant-based weight loss
- Letting Go of Processed Foods
- The Spudfit Mono-Diet
- Weight Loss Industry Diet Secrets
How you eat is as important as what you eat
When you are in a diet mentality and feeling critical of your body this causes stress and can raise cortisol levels.
When you eat quickly and without enjoyment and eat foods you don't really like just to lose weight this can make you gain weight because you put yourself into fight or flight mode.
30 percent of digestion starts before the food hits your stomach
The satisfaction of chewing, textures, sight of the food, and enjoyment are all part of healthy assimilation. If you eat on the run and inhale your food you once again, you put the body into a cortisol producing state. Cortisol is one of the most powerful stress hormones the body produces.
By taking the time to sit down, take a few deep breaths, and enjoy your meals uninterrupted you have a much greater chance of lowering stress levels during meals.
Even without changing anything else about your diet, this can make all the difference in losing the weight you want to lose and increasing your well-being.
Ways to relax for better digestion:
- Close your eyes and take a mini 4-breath meditation before you start eating a meal with long deep breaths to relax the nervous system. (It sounds woo woo but it works).
- Savor your food, by smelling it before you start eating
- Let each bite reach the stomach before taking another bite.
- Turning off the TV and phone while eating
The Psychology of Eating Institute has a lot of information on being present when you are eating.
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Weight Loss Plateaus are Natural
The calories in calories out theory breaks down
The theory of 3500 calories to burn one pound of fat is not an exact science after all. It's true that we must create a calorie deficit but later in your weight loss, the amount can vary. Metabolism may slow down a little as you lose weight a nd have less of you to carry around .
It's inevitable to hit a plateau once you reach the weight that is sustained by the calories you are now eating.
You have to find a way to eat the number of calories it would take to sustain your thinner self.
The problem is that you might have to eat less than you did before you got fat just to hit your target weight. But on a traditional diet of processed foods like oil, flour, sugar and salt, this is impossible.
Often people who go on calorie-restricted diets long term end up with insatiable hunger. Then they gradually start eating a bit more food without noticing.
To break the weight loss plateau you have to find a way to cut calories even further without slowing your metabolism too much. When we cut back too far there is the inevitable pendulum swing to the other extreme.
By eating high-volume low-calorie foods you can keep from triggering hunger hormones. If you keep eating a diet of refined foods it is very hard to resist your hunger signals for more than a few months tops.
With whole foods, you feel full eating fewer calories because plants are high-nutrient high-bulk foods that have fewer calories. So you must learn to prepare high fiber nutrient rich foods if you are to maintain a slim body long term.
Intermittant Fasting
Intermittant fasting schedules of all kinds are very popular lately. Giving your digestion a rest can be very helpful for your metabolism. I have tried this and love the freedom of eating less often. You have so much more time for other things in life and you do lose more weight at first.
Eating two or three meals per day within an 8 or 10 hour window is generally helpful. A small and early dinner is benificial. Just by cutting out nightly snacking when our metabolism is at its lowest can make a big difference in how much fat you burn each day.
But if you get too restrictive for too long you might stop absorbing enough nutrients and develop an eating disorder while you're at it.
Can OMAD: one meal a day help you break a weight loss plateau?
OMAD can be benificial a few times per month, but it isnt a good stratagie long term for most people. OMAD give you diminishing returns the more you do it.
When you get down to one meal per day and do that for a long time it gets to be too difficult for the body to absorb enough nutrients at each meal. After forcing this habit for too long you can start to feel depressed and tired much of the time.
So even if you eat enough calories and eating the healthiest food in the world you may start to get nutrient deficiencies. This can lead to binging and rebound weight gain.
A Whole-Foods, plant diet can take the weight steadily and then maintain it
A plant-based diet consisting of calorie-dilute, whole foods is sustainable over the long haul and will prevent you from gaining the weight back because it is a lifestyle and not a fad diet.
The caveat is that you have to be willing to eat large portions consistently and give up any diet mindset habits. If you don't eat enough of these low-calorie plant foods you will become hungry and end up binging out on processed crap. Then you could come to the conclusion that plant-based whole foods diets don't work.
Plants work but you have to learn to eat more food than you are used to if you want to be successful
A plant-based low-fat diet high in whole unprocessed foods may not give you such a dramatic initial weight loss. But a plant-strong diet is one you can stay on for life without adverse effects.
When you lose weight slowly, one to two pounds per week maximum, you can ensure that you are losing 90% fat . Keto diets, high fat, and high protein diets are deceptive because you get such dramatic changes when you weigh yourself. But these losses are predominantly water and muscle so you end up fatter in the long run.
Eating a plant-based whole-food diet can mean rapid weight loss at first. Your body is eager to dump toxins built up in the tissues and colon.
The fiber in plant foods helps carry away toxins rapidly and help you feel much more satiated with fewer calories. You may also lose a lot of water weight early on if you cut back on salt consumption.
Higher nutrients levels with plant-based nutrition gradually help you get rid of cravings for processed foods.
When you eat a whole-food diet, your body is receiving many more nutrients than on the Standard American Diet (SAD).
As you up to the levels of plants, including berries, beans, leafy greens, nuts, seeds, mushrooms, and onions, you increase your phytonutrient ratio per calorie dramatically.
So the more you eat of low-calorie whole foods, the more weight you will lose without slowing down your metabolism. The reason a bulky high fiber plant-rich diet works is because you're not trying to lose weight by trying to eat small portions of processed foods.
One of the biggest problems with the usual fad-diets is that you are cutting out so many nutrients and so many calories your body begins to fight back by hoarding fat.
And what's worse is that you start to get crazy uncontrollable cravings for high-calorie junk foods.
When I first started on a whole-foods plant-based diet using Chef AJ's book, I lost 30 pounds in a couple of months.
The diet was so high in nutrients I had been missing for a long time. this made it easy to stick with and I was never hungry.
Whole plant foods like beans, sweet potatoes, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables are so low in calories and so high in fiber that the amount I had to eat to get enough calories was about 4 or 5 times as much as the SAD or Standard American Diet.
There was a huge variety of food to choose from and recipes that made it all taste pretty good.
You can learn more about eating nutrient-dense foods at Dr. Joel Fuhrman's site. He has written some incredible books on staying thin and healthy for life and reversing chronic lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, depression, and more.
Dr. Gregor's book, How Not to Diet, is an excellent resource as well.
With this heightened nutrient level, you feel more satiated, so you don't eat as many calories as you used to, and you feel full on the high fiber veggies. It is incredibly easy to lose weight…
At first.
But even a whole foods diet isn't magic and your weight loss will slow down but you will continue to lose weight gradually and reach a healthy weight.
Take a body-positive moment…
But first, make sure you bask in the enjoyment of eating a healthy diet. Then decide if you want or need to lose more weight right this minute.
Ideal weight is different for everyone. Maybe your original goal weight is unrealistic. That is for you to decide.
Even a weight loss of a few pounds is beneficial to your health. If you are stressing yourself out over losing more weight, this could be more stressful than the weight itself — something to think about.
With any diet, the closer you get to the goal, the less food you need. When you were bigger, you needed much more food to maintain all that body mass. Cutting back by a few hundred calories per day made a dramatic difference at first.
Now that you are smaller, the weight loss can slow down or even stop because you are currently eating just the right amount to maintain that first level of weight loss. That's why that last few pounds are always the hardest to lose.
Your Microbiome is the key to successful long-term weight loss
The microbiome has been linked to resistance to weight loss. But this is good news because this is something we can correct through proper diet over time. Be patient and keep going. It can take a couple of years to correct your microbiome, depending on how much damage you have done.
By eating a diet rich in high fiber plants and making sure you get a variety of nutrients every day, you are building a better microbiome.
Our modern diet high in processed foods and animal products is the opposite of what our microbiome likes and is suited for. Even vegan junk foods full of sugar and white flour and oil can destroy good bacteria.
Over-Exercising Won't Magically Make You Thin
Our bodies were built to hold on to fat just in case there is a famine. Getting your body to feel safe enough to let go of that last bit can be a challenge. If you over-exercise, you wear yourself out and make yourself hungrier, so you end up eating more in the long run.
Moderate exercise is excellent but overdoing it won't help you lose weight. There are diminishing returns with training. If you push too hard, you feel run down, and your body begins to rebel by hoarding more fats in case you decide to do that again. Adding strength training can help, and it doesn't have to take up a lot of time.
What you eat is the primary regulator of body fat. Even elite athletes who exercise at the highest levels on earth can remain fat. A great example is Monica Seles, the tennis star who wrote a book about her struggle with binge eating while she was training for many hours every day.
Lack of sleep can stall your weight loss
Make sleeping 7 or more hours a night a priority. Sleep deprivation can cause weight gain by skewing levels of the hormones, leptin, and Ghrelin in the brain and body. This can skew appetite regulation leading to more natural weight gain.
Massage, self-massage yoga, and other soothing focused forms of exercise can be better than adding heavy workouts sometimes. Fluid types of resistance training like Barre class or Pilates can also help.
Eat the right fats in the right amounts
Take a look at your fat consumption. How much and what types of fats are you eating? If you are sticking with starches, beans, veggies, and fruits, you are probably eating low enough calorically that you can eat a high volume of food.
But be careful about higher fat items like tofu and soybeans because they are about 50% fat as opposed to other beans that are a lot lower in fat.
Dairy is great for growing baby calves into 800-pound cows!
If you are still consuming dairy, this could be the culprit. Some studies suggest that the protein fragments called casomorphins in dairy can interfere with your hormones.
Milk has built-in opioids to make the baby animal sleepy and docile after feeding. Do you want that drowsy drug-like effect?
Cheese is a tough one to give up because of the drug-like effect. Cheese has higher concentrations of casomorphins than other types of dairy products.
Our culture is big on the calcium propaganda churned out by the dairy council about milk. But it doesn't add up. We have higher levels of osteoporosis in the US than countries that do not use any dairy products.
I had the hardest time of all giving up cheese.
For most would-be vegans and healthy paleo folks, dairy is the hardest thing to let go of. But if you are having trouble losing weight, you will be happy once you say good-bye to cheese expecially.
Cheese is 70 percent fat and predominantly saturated fats. Cheese and has more sodium than potato chips. The proteins in dairy can cause autoimmune symptoms of inflammation, joint pain, and arthritis.
weight gain is easier with high-fat foods like cheese and oil because there is little energy used up to convert the fat into, well, fat. With carbs, the extra step burns a few calories.
Read, The Cheese Trap, by Neil Barnard MD to learn more about the problems with dairy.
Vegetable Oil Can be a Problem
Try switching out oil for whole foods containing healthy fats to down on calories. Oil can also aggravate inflammation by the irritating the endothelial lining of blood vessels.
What about olive oil and coconut oil?
Olive oil and coconut oil have been touted as wonder foods. Their full fiber origins; coconut and olives are much better for us than the extracted oil which are 100 percent refined and stripped of their phytonutrients.
You get the whole host of phytonutrients from the complete versions. Cooking oils are stripped of all the fiber and most of the nutrients leaving only the fat and minor amounts of beneficial elements if any.
Vegetable oil of any kind packs so many calories, at 120 per tablespoon, that it just isn't healthy food.
Processed oil is found in almost every prepared food, even the so-called healthy ones. You have to check labels carefully and prep more at home.
Sometimes the only way to avoid oily foods is to bring your own home-made oil-free dressing with you when eating out, bringing a food cooler in the car at all times and pre-eat before a meal out in case there isn't much that is edible when you get there.
Essential Fatty Acids
We need healthy essential fats, but they should come from whole foods like avocados, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, raw soaked nuts, and seeds of all kinds in small amounts. Include flax seeds or chia seeds raw freshly ground.
Oily fruits and even sweet potatoes, greens, and other veggies have small amounts of healthy fats in them. As long as you are eating a whole-plant-based-foods every day in a wide variety, you should be getting plenty of fats and essential oils.
The great thing about eating a predominantly plant-based diet and cutting out the oil is that your omega 3, 6 and nine ratios become ideal because plants are much higher in omega 3, the good fats while omega 6 is lower.
This is the opposite in a standard American diet filled with meat, dairy, and oil which makes it almost impossible to get healthy ratios of your EFA's for heart health no matter how much omega-three supplementations you take. It is proposed that inflammation is caused by the high ratio of omega 6 in proportion to omega 3.
An algae-based supplement for EFA and DHA can also be helpful for vegans and non-vegans alike. DHA is essential to absorb vitamin D from sunlight and very important for brain health and overall energy levels.
I can't recommend eating seafood because of the high levels of heavy metals in seafood and because it isn't going to be sustainable for much longer for our oceans. The EFA and DHA in fish come from the algae they consume. So if you go directly to that algae is safer than mercury exposure from fish.
If you do want to eat some seafood, keep to the lower end of the food chain with sardines or anchovies. Avoid larger fish like Tuna and Sea Bass because the larger fish have eaten everyone else and everyone else's toxin load.
The right carbs for plant-based weight loss
You may need to cut back on flour products like pasta and bread. Even the whole grain forms of flour can slow down weight loss and cause cravings for some people, so you end up eating more, or cheating more often.
Higher fiber whole grains like quinoa, Buckwheat, brown rice whole steel cut oats instead of their flour-based counterparts can help speed up your weight loss because you feel satiated faster.
When steel blades grind the fiber of any plant into a fine powder, it destroys the fiber matrix that slows down the absorption of starches into the bloodstream.
Even whole wheat products can casue insulin spikes. Insulin spikes can cause fat storage and weight gain or at least slow down your weight loss.
Check your dried fruit consumption
If you are eating a lot of dates and other dried fruits in your recipes these can be very concentrated. It is easy to overeat dried fruits quickly. For instance, 300 calories of raisins instead of fresh grapeswould be easy to eat in one gulp and you would still be hungry. Eating 300 calories worth of fresh grapes would be a large bowl of food and leave you very full.
Typically fruit is very low in calories at around 300 calories per pound, but things like apples or bananas become extremely high-calorie when dehydrated.
Smoothies and Juices can be an issue
Smoothies can lead to weight gain for some people
This was a big disappointment for me! I used to pound down a smoothie every morning.
We are taught that it is incredibly healthy to have a green smoothie every day. And this is true in a way because a green smoothie is a lot healthier than eating a muffin or many traditional breakfast foods. And there is so many concentrated micronutrients in a smoothie.
But because mechanical blades destroy the fiber this makes the sugars in some plants go into your bloodstream too quickly causing blood sugar issues over time. Susan Peirce Thompson explains why smoothies, dried fruit, and artificial sweeteners can kill weight loss progress.
Eating more salads and whole foods can help with weight loss because you feel full longer.
Smoothies are almost predigested and can leave you hungry or lead to overeating because you have not experienced the chewing sensation. It is a lot easier to overeat on blended foods than whole plants that have to be chewed.
If you cut back on blended meals, like smoothies and protein drinks, you might speed up your weight loss.
Any highly processed foods will have the effect of being higher in concentration and easier to overeat on.
Flour, sugar, protein powders are all designed to fatten us up. Keep your food as close to its natural form as you can for improved insulin sensitivity.
Add more raw, low-fat plants to lose weight faster
This is something we all intuitively know. Raw foodists lose weight fast. I went on a raw food diet for four months and lost a lot of weight very quickly.
But raw food diets are hard to sustain because there is a lot of prep involved to get enough calories. There are many phytonutrients you miss by leaving out whole grains, legumes, and other cooked veggies.
Most people end up compensating for the lack of cooked starches with nuts seeds and dried fruit. Ultimately this turned out to be an unbalancing, frustrating experience.
It just wasn't sustainable long term for me. It was expensive and unsatisfying without starches like sweet potatoes and beans in my diet.
However, adding raw foods at the beginning of every meal can help fill you up. For instance, you could add some carrots, salad greens, jicama, cut up apples, etc. to your meal.
Raw foods are less absorbable for the body and take more energy to digest. The minute you cook foods, you make them more available to the body to use as fuel and stored as fat because there is less energy spent on digestion.
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham goes into all the details of why humans eat cooked food and why it is so hard to subsist on a completely raw foods diet for humans.
The Right Amount and Kind Right of Protein
Contrary to popular belief, it may not be a good thing to eat a high protein diet to lose weight.
Animal protein, even grass-fed, still tends to be higher in fat per pound and has more toxins in it than plants. In reality, you are eating not a high protein diet but a high fat and toxin diet when you ingest too much animal protein.
You may lose weight faster for a little while, but the point is to have healthy lasting weight loss without increasing your risk of disease.
Protein isolates and powders are too easy to digest and speed through your system without needing to be worked on. You may want to try cutting back on protein powders if you use them and try more beans and plant proteins.
The World Health Organization has been recommending that 10 to 15 percent of your diet should come from protein.
But in the US, the meat and dairy industry fund the FDA and distorting our data to sell their products. The China Study and Whole by T Collin Campbell explain why we are encouraged to eat animal products.
These foods have been proven to lead to disease in humans in many studies done inside and outside of the US. Dean Ornish has also done some in-depth studies.
The problem with Keto and Paleo
Keto, Paleo, and other high-fat, high-protein animal-based diets give you rapid weight loss at first.
But a high protein high fat with virtually no carbohydrates causes drastic water loss and only about 75% fat loss, the rest is muscle and water.
Studies have found that more overall fat loss came from a plant-based diet than a ketogenic diet without the high risks of heart disease and cancer that come with chronic ketosis and high-fat diets.
You don't want to lose muscle mass when you diet because muscle mass is one of the best ways to keep your metabolism up so you can burn fat easily.
People tend to gain more fat than before the diet every time they go on and off a high protein and high-fat diet.
On a balanced, low-fat, plant-strong, whole foods diet you are losing 90 to 95% fat and very little muscle mass.
Being in ketosis is dangerous long term and can cause insulin resistance due to the fat in the blood blocking insulin receptors in the cells. So when you do go off your diet or stray even a tiny bit you spike your insulin levels. this is why people gain so much weight so fast when they end ketosis or a high-fat diet.
Diets high in saturated fat are not natural and can be dangerous for your health in the long run. Keto diets can raise your cholesterol and inflammation levels
Another problem with a diet low in whole-plant sourced complex carbohydrates; like fruits, veggies, nut, and seeds, is that you are missing out on most phytonutrients you need to fight diseases.
Keto diets can compromise the microbiome
By eating a diet of predominantly animal fats and proteins you can damage the microbiome. One of the biggest sources of fat burning is the fiber in the colon. if this is missing it makes it much harder to maintain fat loss.
Sadly businesses profit when we stay fat and sick
The US has become one of the least healthy countries in the world with high rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, mental health issues, and a lot of other diseases. Much of the reason is the agricultural and pharmaceutical policies in this country.
Everything has to be FDA approved to be taken seriously. FDA approval costs millions of dollars in scientific studies. Only a few large companies can afford to have their products studied with scientific rigor.
This is the reason there is little emphasis on simple dietary solutions to disease and obesity. Few people are doing studies on herbs, and whole plant foods that cannot be patented.
In Summary
- Get the stress out of your eating and stop the diet mentality
- Eat your largest meal early in the day and stop eating 4 hours or more before sleep
- Eat more whole foods and avoid cravings for processed crap.
- Improve your microbiome with fiber
- Do exercise you enjoy but try not to overdo it.
- Eating more raw foods can aid in speeding up weight loss.
- Check your dried fruit and other hidden concentrated sugar consumption.
- Consider cutting out oil and checking your consumption of nuts.
- Cut down on dairy products which can be high in fat and mess with hormones.
- Keep your carbohydrates whole, try cutting back on flour, dried fruits, and smoothies.
- Make adequate sleep a priority, meditation, and self-massage are also helpful.
Resources
- The Biome Clinic
- Happy Gut Life
- Soil Based Probiotics
- The Gut Institute
- Probiotic Advisor
- Seed
Weight Plateau on Plant Based Diet
Source: https://mindbodyclarity.com/weight-loss-plateau-plant-based-diet/