How to Eat to Your Heart's Content and Still Lose Weight

Isn’t it odd that people get fat so often?

Wild animals put on fat when their bodies need it, before winter or a long migration, and then use it. Our fat gain has no such season.

So why do so many of us carry extra weight all year round?

After all, hunger should regulate depending on how much energy and nutrients we need.

The problem with the modern food supply is that we eat too many calories and too little nutrition.

If we ate a balanced whole plant food diet, we would undereat on our calories and overeat on our antioxidants and phytonutrients.

What is a balanced diet exactly?

A balanced diet is usually considered a diet that includes all foods in moderation.

That sounds all well and good until we dive into the discussion about what is a human food.

A human food is not a food created by humans.

It is not oil, not sugar, not white flour, not soft drinks, not dairy even!

Nowhere in nature an olive squeezes itself into a bottle or a cow fills jars with her milk by herself.

Olives are just olives, sugar cane is just sugar cane and the only time a cow gives milk is when she had her baby calf.

Humans created so many of the foods that we consider ‘normal’ when they are artificial and fattening!

All processed foods, oils, sugars and all dairy are in fact never normal.

So a balanced diet is not about eating a bit of everything that we see on the supermarket shelves.

A balanced diet is about eating the foods that are normal for us as a species.

In a nutshell, eat whole plant foods

Whole plant foods are full of fiber, micronutrients and slowly digestible calories.

The fiber fills you up. Fiber is an indigestible carbohydrate. It fills up your stomach and you do not eat calories in excess.

The micronutrients come along for free: the vitamins, minerals and plant compounds your body needs anyway.

The natural, fiber-bound fats and complex carbohydrates are slow to digest and absorb, and their bulk fills you up before you have eaten a lot of calories.

Whole natural plant foods are the foods our ancestors ate

Where do we come from as a species?

We share almost 99 percent of our directly comparable DNA with chimpanzees, and about 98 percent with gorillas.

Our closest relatives eat mostly plants, and cooked starches like tubers have long been a staple of the human diet too.

We have neither the teeth nor claws of a predator and for most of our history, we had no way to milk cows, press oils or refine sugars.

So, the foods that are left for us to consume are the plants that our trim, lean and strong primate cousins thrive on.

How whole natural plant foods control our appetite

It’s simple: they contain fiber and nutrients.

Fiber

Fiber is a form of indigestible carbohydrate that fills our stomachs without adding calories.

Think about the fiber in celery or an apple.

When we remove the fiber, we remove the bulk in our food that our digestive tract is expecting.

We also lose something that binds bile acids in the gut and carries them out, one reason whole plant foods lower cholesterol.

Micronutrients

Micronutrients are particles in our food that we do not use for energy.

Vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, phytochemicals…

They are so abundant in whole plant foods that if we eat enough calories, we eat more than enough of them.

What processed food does is make overeating easy.

In a controlled NIH study, people offered ultra-processed meals ate about 500 more calories a day than when they were offered unprocessed meals, even though the meals were matched for sugar, fat, fiber and salt.

Only whole plant foods have the micronutrients we need

Sugar or oil or any processed, packaged food in the store has much of the fiber and nutrition removed.

Meat has no fiber at all, and fiber is the part that fills you up.

Cow’s milk is designed for baby calves.

It has a different protein and content, optimized for a growing bovine animal. Not a human, even a child.

Children do not need cow’s milk to grow well, as long as their diet supplies enough calcium, protein and vitamin B12 from other sources.

In a nutshell, eat whole plants galore and lose the extra weight

It’s simple.

In a New Zealand trial, people eating as much as they wanted of a whole-food plant-based diet lost far more weight over six months than people on usual care.

Lean on potatoes, beans, grains, vegetables and fruit, and go easier on nuts and dried fruit.

Just try our recipes for a while and you will know what we are talking about!