The Engine 2 Diet
March 16, 2009 
If anyone told you that you could lose weight, drastically improve your cholesterol levels, have the stamina and buff physique of a firefighter - all on a completely vegan diet - would you believe them? Rip Esselstyn, author of The Engine 2 Diet, thinks you can! We found a lot to love in this diet plan, but we also had a small bone to pick with it.
Do you love a good burger, dripping with mayo and cheese? Is your husband a real meat and potatoes man that resists anything remotely healthy? The Engine 2 Diet is a 28 day diet plan that is far from what you might expect a vegan diet to be. In case you are not familiar with vegan diets, this is a completely plant based diet. You not only give up meat, but you also give up dairy and eggs. On the E2 diet, you won’t be left with just carrot sticks and brown rice. You will eat tacos, fajitas, omelets, meat loaf, pizza, chocolate pudding and more! Don’t be thrown by the vegan label, and don’t think you’ll be malnourished on this diet. The plan is loaded with protein, calcium, and every nutrient you need.
Rip Esselstyn is a professional triathlete and firefighter that also lives a vegan lifestyle and has done so for more than 12 years He’s surrounded by steak-loving men in an Austin Texas fire house. How on earth could he convince his fellow firefighters to trade their steaks for tofu? It all started with a bet. While hanging around the firehouse, they all bet who would have the lowest cholesterol. After getting tested, they found many had very scary cholesterol levels. One member of the team, JR, had a cholesterol level of 344 and everyone realized this was a matter of life or death. The team rallied around JR, and Rip promised them all that they could lower their cholesterol if they would just change their diets. And so it began. Everyone switched to a plant based diet while on duty and their health improved. JR’s cholesterol dropped to 270. Then Rip bet him that he could make a dramatic change if he switched to a completely plant based diet both at work and at home. Just 3 weeks later, his cholesterol had dropped to 196!
From there, Rip created a 28 day plant based diet and volunteers put it to the test. Pilot studies showed massive drops in cholesterol, and everyone also lost weight. They did it by creating delicious vegan versions of favorite foods such as tacos and pizza. They also included a simple exercise program for overall fitness. The results were consistently good! Now the plan is available to you in a book, and the basics are even online for free.
The Engine 2 Diet makes switching to a plant based diet easy by providing recipes that mimic your meaty favorites and are just as good or better. We made the chocolate pudding and fed it to a group of kids and they begged for more! The ingredients were just silken tofu, unsweetened cocoa powder, agave nectar, and a smidgen of vanilla. It took just seconds to make in the food processor. We also served the family tacos using corn tortillas, Morningstar Farms crumbles, fresh salsa, and we spread the tortillas with hummus before adding the other ingredients. The hummus made a surprising difference and the tacos were addictive!
We suspect that most dieters are going to ask what they are allowed to eat on the E2 diet. Even healthy diet plans like South Beach divide fruits and veggies into good and bad lists. With E2, the only taboo foods are animal based. If it’s a plant then it’s OK, just prepare it in a low fat way. Don’t go nuts with nuts, oils, or higher fat plant based foods foods. It’s really that easy.
Engine 2 makes going vegan simple. The book and website are filled with guides that even seasoned vegans will find useful. But we are also interested in weight loss, aren’t we? Their studies showed that everyone who followed the diet lost weight. I guess if you are used to eating drippy burgers and cheese laden pizza, switching to a diet like this will automatically cause weight loss. But what about the rest of us that have been counting calories and measuring portions for a while now? Engine 2 is going to reduce your cholesterol and make you feel better. But the recipes don’t include calorie counts, and not all include serving suggestions. Vegan doesn’t mean calorie free, and we can only imagine how many calories are in the recipe for Sweet Potato Lasagna. Can we eat it and still have dessert? This is really the only problem we had with the Engine 2 Diet. We don’t mind figuring out portion sizes and calories on our own, but many dieters prefer the details and find it makes a new diet easier to grasp.
If you are interested in learning more, you can buy the book from Amazon, watch the video on the official Engine 2 Diet website, or sign up for a free membership on the E2 Academy website and get free recipes, a free menu plan, and even a grocery list to get you started. We think it’s worth checking out!
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I just had to comment on your review: “Vegan doesn’t mean calorie free, and we can only imagine how many calories are in the recipe for Sweet Potato Lasagna. Can we eat it and still have dessert? … We don’t mind figuring out portion sizes and calories on our own, but many dieters prefer the details and find it makes a new diet easier to grasp.”
I’ve been eating the Engine2 way for 6 months now and have lost 30 lbs (and yes, cholesterol etc is lowered too). I’m not hungry. I don’t weigh or measure or count or anything else.
That’s the whole point of eating this way! You do not have to count calories or points, weigh & measure your food, or any of that other stuff we’ve all been doing for years. It took me a good month or two to really accept that I could eat this way, and not feel “guilty” when I had a huge bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and then 2 huge burritos for lunch.
I’ve been on Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Atkins, South Beach, ediets, and probably others I’ve forgotten about, and never lost more than 8-10 lbs because I was always HUNGRY and also got sick of all the counting/measuring. You do not have to deprive yourself of food when you eat the Engine2 way, because what you will be eating is real, filling, satisfying FOOD.
If I don’t lose weight for a couple of weeks, I know to cut back treats that are high in sugar or fat, or are more refined: like soy pudding, “vegan” cookies, peanut butter, etc. Those are the only items where you still need to exercise “portion control.” However if you truly eliminate fats and sugary stuff from your diet (including hidden fats & artificially sweetened crap) you will quickly find that you lose your taste for that stuff.
You can eat until you are full, and eat again when you are hungry… as long as you eat real food. That is, whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and legumes, without added oils, and not going overboard on the sugars. This isn’t a “diet” in the conventional sense; it’s a way of eating that will train your palate to love real food that nourishes your body instead of harms it. And it’s point isn’t to be vegan; you can be vegan and live on pop-tarts and diet coke. The point is to eat foods that promote health and eliminate the foods that cause disease.
So, can you have your dessert too? I have dessert every day, often twice a day. Absolutely, but you change your definition of dessert from ice cream to sorbet (ever had Ciao Bello Blackberry Cabernet Sorbet or Chocolate Sorbet? Believe me girls, you will NOT feel deprived!). Cookies mean whole-grain chocolate chip cookies made from the Engine2 recipe or any of the many other recipes out there (fatfreevegan.com, drmcdougall.com, pcrm.org, etc) instead of the Toll House recipe.
Sorry for the long post, but I just HAD to let you know that your worries are unfounded.
Its strange when I was young I got swept up into the Vegan diet, not for health reasons but for animal compassion reasons. The Vegan diet dropped a considerable amount of weight but more importantly I felt so alive, energetice, and clear headed. when I came home my parents wondered what had happened to me, when I told them of the diet they became worried I was not getting enough nutrition and they were not supportive of my dietary choice at all, even going so far as to tease me about it. Fast Forward around ten years, I had long since dropped the vegan diet and I had ballooned 50 plus pounds. I come home to visit the parents and my mom is holding the engine 2 diet book, and tells me about its vegan diet, before I can even say anything, she admits I was right all those years back. Now I am going Vegan not for the animals but myself. I know there is all types of reasons a Vegan diet can be helpful to the human body, like lowering the cholesterol and preventing such things as cancer, but honestly no one thinks of that stuff till it actually happens to them. I myself gained a physical ailment because of my excess weight and that is I have lower back pain, and I know its because of this big belly I am hauling around. Anyways, I know for myself and my body physiology that a vegan diet works.
The Engine 2 diet is it!! Eliminating dairy and white bread was the trick for me. I unlocked the secret finally! Am feeling so much better. Read book review I wrote on our blog called VABOOMER:
http://tinyurl.com/engine2diet
I’m going to try it. I’ve been meaning to go vegan for a while. I’m currently a lacto-ovo vegetarian, but lately, I’ve been noticing that anything animal based makes me feel weighed down and icky. It’s even gotten to the point that I can’t eat dairy without getting sick. I noticed that I feel better when I eat vegan meals (but not on purpose).
I’ll let you know how it goes!