Hey yall, I wanted to introduce myself to all the lovely veg ladies in the forum. I have lost weight before, 100 pounds to be exact, and did great. I kept off the weight for three years and turned vegan and suddenly thought it was a license to eat whatever I want. Well I obvious gained a ton of weight back and here I am once again. I look forward to the challenges losing weight as a vegan will present, but it's been difficult to stay with any one program. I hope we can encourage and support each other. I'm so excited for our journey to become healthier, happier individuals! 💛💙💜💚❤️

Welcome to the forum! It's quiet sometimes but it's helpful. I too am trying to lose while vegan. It has taken me a while but I have finally found a plan that works for me.

Great job!! Glad that I read this part this method helped you.. with your efforts and thanks for posting, it gave me hope now..Have a healthy day!!

Hi! I lurk way more than I post, but I wanted to say that I totally relate to gaining weight while vegan. I lost slowly and then stabilized for the first couple of years, but as better vegan processed foods came out, my diet started looking pretty bad again. That, and I started dating someone who really liked my vegan baked goods, and within a year, I regained the 15-20 pounds I'd lost. I just started following Eat to Live again and I've dropped seven pounds already in the first week, so that's been encouraging.

The great thing is that once you've lost it once, you know you can do it. Good luck!

In an effort to entice my husband and children to veganism I've been buying ( and eating) far too much vegan goodies. I lost weight initially from eating more fruit vegeees and rice but it's creeping back.

'Easiest' way to practice weight loss with a vegan diet is to cut all baked goods, limit fruit to 2 servings a day, and focus on your protein consumption (I know you can get enough protein in a vegan diet, but in the case of fat loss, it is particularly important to really focus on it).

At least 3 of your meals should have lentils or some kind of soy (those are the highest protein ratio legumes). Also make a commitment to play around with various hemp/pea/rice protein powders until you find a brand that doesn't make you gag.

Sprouting is your friend; sprouted lentils, quickly blanched make a superb salad/garnish - mung beans are another easy one. Personally, I try not to eat soy that hasn't been fermented - tempeh is an awesome tasting and easily modified choice. Natto is an acquired taste. Making your own fermented tofu is not that hard (http://www.vietworldkitchen.com/blog...ke-recipe.html).

Garbanzos are awesome and tasty, but relatively high in fat for beans - use them sparingly. Black beans have the next highest protein content, and then kidney/navy beans. Split peas/black eyed peas/mung/adzuki/pinto have slightly less, but are excellent choices.

Other sources of protein like quinoa, hemp, buckwheat, etc. are great - but keep in mind that they are not 'high protein' foods; they would need to be supplementary, not your main source.

Generally, aim for a minimum of 0.8g of protein for every kg you weigh. For fat loss, it is often more effective to aim for 1-3g/kg. If you put together a few 'sample meal plans' for a few days that ensure you are hitting those protein goals plus 5-8 servings of veggies/day, everything else will fall into place. My experience is that you will likely not be very hungry, because of the fiber from the beans.

Best of luck, and remember to have fun!

Hi, there! Something similar happened to me when I went vegan (in 2012) and it's taken me a while to figure out what works for me: high carb, low-fat, minimally processed. I simply can't eat the vegan snacks & treats on a daily basis, they tend to trigger overeating.

I follow Dr. McDougall, Barnard, etc. in their low-fat, high veggie carb teachings and the closer I stay to whole food, plant based, the better off I am. I also log my food intake and try to keep it between 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day. The weight is coming off, slowly but surely!

I just started to really lose weight. I may pull the scale out now. I can actually see the shift happening. My problem was cooking with too much oil, and cheese and dairy. As soon as I cut out eggs, dairy, and oil, (as well as most sugar) I started to drop the pounds fairly quickly. Now I am not using much oil (possibly only coconut oil, and then once every 2-3 days) also, no mayo or eggs. I am also on high carb, with most of my food made of potatoes, rice, or beans. It is kind of bland. I use a lot of spices and sriracha sauce.

I have started following the Happy Herbivore diet. She sells monthly meal plans that plans all of your meals, calories, etc. I find that really helpful.

Hello! I've been vegan for twenty years and lost 35lb five years ago at a peaceful rate of a 1lb/week. Calorie counting works for me, and once you pay attention you get used to the nutrient density of different foods. I tend to go for seven almonds or six cashews in a portion, for instance, as that's 50g and feels like a nice amount in the food.

My advice is to eat a wholefoods diet, limit processed foods and baked goods to occasional treats, don't worry about protein powders and such unless you feel you actually need them (e.g. if you lift weights), and it's a good idea to combine proteins for at least two meals a day. There are three groups of vegetable proteins: grains, pulses, and nuts/seeds. (I have no idea where the pseudo-grains such as quinoa and buckwheat fit in.)

So for instance, when I make up a batch of soup, I'll put in 100g each (dry weight) of a pulse and a grain. It feels a lot more sustaining and satiating. The soup I made up yesterday was onion, potato, carrot, beetroot, black-eyed beans and barley, for instance, and made six portions. Last time I generally went for soup or salad for lunch, with a slice of bread, I'll try to do that again.

I have a little bread machine and make my own sourdough in it, and find that sourdough is much more satiating. It's been found in research to be great for blood sugar.

Don't start cutting out food groups unless you have a really, really good reason, such as allergies or Crohn's. Ignore people waffling on about how all grains are evil, it's nonsense and will leave you with not much to eat. I'm not impressed by the Macdougall diet either, not enough fat or protein. Definitely don't go for a raw diet, same problem and it's not safe long-term, very bad for the teeth in particular. Also don't try to go low-carb (unless you really have to e.g. for diabetes), that's not really that healthy and is very, very hard to do on a vegan diet. Just eat a nice mix of wholefoods, try to get at least 15% of calories from protein, and set your calories at a reasonable level.

Random note to Defining: did you misread a label or something on garbanzos/chick peas? You made me wonder if I'd missed something, so I went and checked. Nope, they're as low in fat as any other bean. Personally I don't worry too much about the slight variations in nutrients between beans, and go for a nice variety that my partner and I will both enjoy eating. I bulk-buy chick peas, kidney beans and brown lentils from Amazon as there's a nice brand you can get there, and we also use butter beans a lot. I am lucky enough to live very close to two Chinese supermarkets, and get beautiful fresh tofu from there. It makes such a difference when it's fresh, not the rubbery supermarket stuff. I sometimes cut slices, spread them with a bit of pesto, and nosh.

Quinoa's excellent stuff, it's a complete protein. Again, get a nice variety of grains if you can, and wholegrains are better if you and your insides like them.

I can't think of a pulse or grain which is bad for you, although obviously processing it to death and back is problematic. With nuts and seeds, on the other hand, the fat content is high, so use them more sparingly.

Operative word: relatively. Garbanzos have 3-4g fat per 100g of beans, in comparison to the more typical 0.5-1g/100g of many/most others. That being said, still not a huge concern really. Biggest reason I flagged them is because chickpeas are often prepared in high fat methods like hummus and roasting with oil, but it's all good in moderation. I quite like fat in most of it's forms, so I don't even see any problems with it being a good chunk of your calories - so long as you know that it's there.

I've just checked the nutrition data for chick peas/garbanzos, and it's 2.6g fat per 100g. That's not a high fat food in any way. You can prepare anything with other ingredients which are higher in fat, and I feel it's misleading to tell people to avoid something for this reasons when it's actually a low-fat food. You really don't need to use them sparingly!

Fair enough!

I was curious, so I looked up what is considered a low-fat food, and a heart organisation (can't remember which one, sorry!) defined it as being below 3g fat/100g. So chick peas do fit in that, along with pulses in general. Which is good, as they're delicious.

I find it can be easy to get a bit too wrapped up in the finer points of nutrition, to the point where you're ignoring one food for having 10% less protein than a similar food, and getting bored from having a more limited diet. I've also found a shocking amount of misinformation online about nutrition.

For instance, look at the people trying to persuade you that pink Himalayan salt is the most wonderful thing ever. They will claim that it has this fantastic mineral profile and will supply you with all your trace minerals. They don't mention that it's actually just road salt, nor that in order to get even a modestly significant amount of magnesium, say, from pink salt, you'd need to eat so much of it that you'd be dead from sodium poisoning long before you got there.

Similarly, I saw an article claiming that calorie for calorie, kale has as much calcium as milk or chicken. This would be fine if the general nutrient density and portion sizes were similar, but they're not. Apparently a fairly standard portion size for chicken breast is 4oz (113g) and 130 cal. You'd need to eat 9oz (260g) of kale to get 130 cal, which is more than the huge bags of kale my supermarket sells and which recently went into 8 portions of fairly kale-heavy soup. No one is eating that much kale as a portion in solid food, and I suspect very, very few are eating that much through smoothies. It is certainly not a normal portion size that you'd have as a main course in a meal! That much kale would also provide you with 2124mcg of Vitamin K, which is 2655% of the RDA. That's important because Vitamin K has a strong effect on blood clotting. My partner is on blood thinners for life following a deep vein thrombosis, and he's not allowed to go anywhere near kale! So again, this article is suggesting potentially dangerous, and certainly uneatable, amounts of kale as a normal portion. It's a perfectly nice food in its way, but it's not a strong source of calcium.

Then there was the article I found when considering oils to put on my hair which decided that olive oil was better to eat than sunflower oil because it was a source of magnesium and other minerals! No idea where they got that from, because I've checked on the nutritiondata website and even a whole cup of olive oil (urg, you'd be so ill) has zero magnesium. (And besides, I wanted to put it on my hair.)

Moral of story: approach articles and such about nutrition with caution, and always double check portion sizes. And goodness, there are some weird ideas online.