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• Vegetarian Weight Loss

Working with Calories

Our body requires energy to function. And energy comes from the food we eat. So, how does a healthy body typically handle energy (or calories as we often call it) it consumes in order to maintain a healthy body weight?

Generally, we can sum up the energy balance for a healthy body in a radical equation like this:

Calories In = Calories Expended + Calories Stored + Calories Excreted

When you consume a certain amount of calories, your body decides how much of these calories are needed immediately to fuel your basic metabolic functions and daily physical activities (calories expended). It then packs away a portion of the calories into energy reserve for future use — as glycogen in your liver and muscles, as protein in lean body tissues and as fat all over your body (calories stored).

Ok, you may already know the above. How about the fact that calories also get removed as feces?

Yes, researchers found human stools do contain energy in the form of dead microbes and unabsorbed calories up to 60% depending on your soluble fiber intake.

The concept of associating gut bacteria (aka gut microbes or gut flora) with calories emerges only in recent years. Not only do gut bacteria affect the amount of calories you excreted, they also play a role in the quantity of calories you absorb. Some preliminary researches reveal that each of us holds a different mix of bacteria in our gut which predisposes us to obesity more easily.

That implies, for a same bowl of cereal, some people may extract more calories out of it than others and the effect will add up over time.

I won't go into details about gut bacteria here (not much of a concern as compared to what we'll be focusing on). I just want you to know this — you don't really absorb all calories even though your body manages to break down all the food it consumes.

Surprisingly, few people (less than 0.01% of the world population) possess the innate ability to expel excess calories to prevent them from gaining weight. Their body does this by burning off the excess as extra heat or inducing more physical activities. In other words, their metabolism is always running actively to help them keep unwanted fat at bay. Thus, they form the group of lean people whom we greatly envy — they never seem to grow fat no matter how much they eat.

Many seem to lack this ability due to an underlying hormonal or metabolic disorder. That's why they gain weight and become obese. Though scientists have not found a specific solution to correct all sorts of disorders that cause obesity, they do agree that eating a healthy, well-balanced nutritious diet does help to fight weight problems. You'll find out why in the next section.

What have You been Eating?

Sarah loves fast food and fried stuff. Ice-cream, candy, chocolate (lots of it) and soft drinks too. As a vegetarian, she carries the typical (wrong) mindset that all vegetarian foods are healthy and won't make people gain weight. But the fact is, these fatty foods (though in vegetarian version) carry exceptionally high calories but pathetically low nutrients.

To make matter worse, she doesn't like to work out. Her degree of laziness increases as her size grows.

She's been gorging on these super toxic foods for 11 years until one day (in her mid 30's) while she's waiting in front of an ice-cream stall for her family to pick her up, at the same time licking her favorite chocolate ice-cream, a car drove past and a young guy at the backseat sticking his head out the window yelled at her, "HEY FAT CHICK, ICE-CREAM'S NICE, HUH!". The sarcastic remark hit her so hard like a 5-ton hammer that she suddenly realized that she needs to slim down (standing only 5 ft 2 inches, she weighed 217 lbs / 97 kg then).

Desperate to get fast results and terrified of people calling her names, without doing much research about proper weight loss, she turns to low-calorie diet — a diet that claims to help her lose weight rapidly even without exercising.

Does Sarah's case sound familiar to you? You may not experience what Sarah has gone through, but one thing for sure is, you're eating unhealthily like her, and you've probably been on a low-calorie diet before trying to get rid of your ugly excess fat. Right?

What's Wrong with Low-Calorie (Calorie Restriction) Diet?

The negative effect of low-calorie diet can be 10 times worse than before you take it. Here's why.

When you lower your calorie intake, your body will adjust itself to use less energy from the reduced fuel intake so as to save on energy. What's even worse is that these diets usually require you to stick to only a specific list of food, which do not provide your body with a full spectrum of nutrients it needs to function optimally. Furthermore, you don't exercise. Even if you do feel like working out, you won't have the energy to perform.

Consequently, your metabolism slows down and you'll feel sluggish, fatigue, irritable, moody, anxious, forgetful and difficult to concentrate in the short run. Headache may even set in to increase your misery. Your condition will aggravate when you continue to eat unhealthily.

As you continue to cut back on calorie consumption by eating less food (you reduce your nutritional intake further as well), you become apathetic and withdrawn into your own world. And constantly feeling weak and sleepy all day long. Irrational thoughts and behavior start to manifest which revolve around food.

Unbelievably as it sounds, your body will also try to stock up fat for future use (it's your body's survival reaction) when it detects a lack in fuel. The longer you diet, the more fat your body will fight to store (which explains why some dieters even after they slim down still bear high body fat content).

Meanwhile, your body will turn to muscle for fuel if your current calorie intake can't supply enough fuel. Lost muscles are difficult to replace.

That's not the worst, my friend. You detest the hollow hunger gnawing at you all day long until one day you can't take it anymore and decide to call it quits. (NO human can withstand prolonged hunger and nutrient deprivation even with the strongest willpower on earth because we're physiologically designed to eat when hungry). By then your daily calorie requirement may have dropped to say, 800 calories (dangerously below the minimum threshold of your daily resting calorie requirement).

Two drastic abnormalities happen when you quit the crash diet and get right back to your normal calorie intake of say, 1700 calories per day.

• Because your body had previously gone into semi-starvation mode for quite a while, the moment it "sees" so much energy supply gushing in, it will, spontaneously, push as much calories as possible straight into your fat cells for fear it might go starving again. Like a severely dehydrated person in desert who chanced upon a water pool right in front of him. Naturally, he will gulp down as many liters as his stomach can hold. Or he'll try to stock up as much water in whatever containers he has as possible for later use.

• Bingeing starts right after you stop starving. (Also known as compulsive overeating, bingeing involves wolfing down huge amounts of junk food without the ability to stop or control eating. It's even more common and frightening than bulimia or anorexia.) Did you realize that the more you starve, the longer and more severe the binges get?
  
  That's because you want to pamper yourself after going without food for so long. Yes, starving does make you feel very miserable. So you eat to feed your feelings, rather than your body.
  
  However, after the binges, you'll feel guilty, depressed, disgusted and frustrated over your stupid act. And you get back on the low-nutrition, low-calorie crash diet next day. Not long after, you break the starvation again. As you can see, it becomes a vicious cycle. Most importantly, your body still don't get ample nutrients to boost metabolism, and the excess calories turn into extra body fat.

Now you understand why those who dropped their calorie restriction diets after weeks grow to become even fatter than before they took up the diets.

Remember Sarah? She came to me after failing in her unhealthy dieting program. I introduced her a high-nutrition vegetarian meal plan and her weight dropped by 34 lbs (15.4 kg) after 4 months. Although the process was slow and she still got 65 pounds (29.5 kg) to lose before she reaches her ideal weight, she never felt so excited and rewarding before because she never suffers any yo-yo effect this time round.

What's more, she now has more energy to incorporate exercise in her regimen. I'm sure she'll achieve her ideal body shape eventually. How about the exact same healthy diet meal plan for you?

The Proven Healthy Diet that Shrinks Your Size and Keeps You Lean

Kardena Pauza, a well-known name among vegetarians, who used to grow up on S.A.D. (standard american diet) had transformed herself from a big, fat girl into a svelte, charming lady after taking her self-prescribed vegetarian meal plan. But that's not astonishing enough!

Kardena turns from fat to slim after a fat-burning vegetarian meal plan. Want to be like her?

In 2006, she met with a horrendous car accident that torn many of her muscles completely and incapacitated her for an entire year during recovery. Instead of gaining weight due to her forced sedentary lifestyle after accident, she amazed all her friends by staying slender with her proudly-invented vegetarian meal plan.

What are her secrets? Or more to the point, what's inside her diet that saved her waistline from expanding even when she didn't work out for a year?

The success of her diet lies in her ingenious application of the law of nutrition in her vegetarian meal plan. And how does the law of nutrition associate with weight loss? Why is it so powerful?

Look, your body cells ultimately call the shots in requiring and expending the energy consumed. In other words, they're the one controlling your metabolism. So, you should spontaneously provide them with a steady and reliable supply of nutrients as fuel. Not only quantity is important, quality of nutrients also determines how efficient your cells absorb the nutrients for use.

Besides the 3 macronutrients — carbohydrate, protein and fat, your body needs vitamins A, B-family including B-complex like biotin, choline, folic acid, inositol, cobalamin (B12), C, D, E and K and minerals such as iron, calcium, chromium, manganese, zinc, etc for optimal weight management.

Consuming adequate quantity of these nutrients (coupling with drinking sufficient water to hydrate your body for peak metabolism) can strengthen your cells so they can break down your fat and glucose more effectively, which in turn stimulate your calorie-burning power.

Kardena's healthy vegetarian meal plans contain these metabolism-boosting nutrients, and plenty of them. To top it off, you'll be delighted to find in all her recipes bounty of natural foods carrying complex-carbohydrate to fuel you with all the energy you need to cope with any heavy-lifting tasks.

How Complex-Carb Energizes You

To see how complex-carb provides you with energy for survival, first you need to understand the impact of 2 important hormones on your weight.

In order to lose weight, you need to keep these 2 hormones in balance:

1. Glucagon — Fat-releasing hormone important in weight loss.
2. Insulin — Fat-storing hormone that pushes blood glucose to your muscle, liver and fat cells.

Protein intake stimulates glucagon just as carb intake does for insulin. But carb can appear more frightening as it also suppresses glucagon release and deters breaking down of fat molecules.

Most of us face problem with keeping our insulin level (rather than glucagon level) in check because we eat too much simple (refined) carb. When you eat simple carb that breaks down easily, your blood glucose rises rapidly. Sometimes at a level too high for comfort.

Remember the "high" feeling you get after eating a handful of cookies?

High blood glucose in turn triggers large amounts of insulin release from pancreas and holds back glucagon release. Insulin then quickly drives blood glucose to muscles, liver and fat for use or for storage as glycogen or fat, resulting in rapid fall in your blood glucose level below normal.

Your brain is the first to respond since it runs on glucose. Consequently, you'll feel fatigue, irritable, anxious, loss of concentration and hunger for more food, particularly more carbs. Most likely, these symptoms, especially food craving, happens within a short time after you've eaten. If you ingest more simple carbs again, the vicious cycle repeats.

As you can see, abusing your insulin day in, day out not only traps your existing fat but also adds more fat to your body as the unused excess calories turn into fat.

Obesity is not the only enemy you'll face.

Over time, some or all of your cells don't respond well to normal amount of insulin anymore in removing the blood glucose from bloodstream. Rising blood glucose can produce two toxic products — free radicals and AGEs (advanced glycation end-products). Both will attack and wreck your cells and tissues. Hence, your pancreas must secrete even more insulin to deal with the blood glucose at once, before these "assassin duo" inflict more damages.

By then, you may develop adult-onset, or Type 2 diabetes and trigger other health problems like high triglyceride, heart disease, stroke and hypertension. All because of insulin resistance.

Unlike simple-carb, raw complex-carb contains dietary fiber and starches intertwined into an intricate pattern. Thanks to its complexity, your digestive enzymes and small intestine need to use up more calories and time to break down the starches within the fiber, thereby slowing down your digestion process.

As a result, energy is released for use at a more gradual rate without spiking your blood glucose and release of insulin. So, you enjoy a steady stream of energy over a longer period without experiencing those side effects associated with insulin abuse.

Maintaining a steady flow of blood glucose and normal insulin level also allows glucagon (fat-burning hormone) to share the energy supply load by burning fat. And if you become more active, the fat-burning effect becomes more obvious.

That explains why those who eat complex-carb foods like bran, cereal, oatmeal, brown rice, beans, lentils, green leafy vegetables etc get to burn more calories yet feeling more energized over a longer period than those who ingest simple-carb foods like pastries, sugared drinks, white bread and other refined foods.

Now you know why athletes, especially marathon runners, eat foods loaded with complex-carb to keep them charged-up throughout the running bout. Not forgetting that these foods also help them trim off their body fat and make them so lean and built.

how much calorie You Need

You have learned that keeping your metabolism active is the best and only way to lose weight effectively and healthily. However, if you ingest more calories than what your metabolism can handle, your fat mass will still increase. So, you gotta find out how much calorie you need per day (by using our Calorie Intake Caculator below) so as to avoid heaping on excess calories.

How to use our Calorie Intake Calculator?

* Our Calorie Intake Calculator (CIC) uses Mifflin formula and yields more reliable results than those using Harris-Benedict formula.

— Tell us your gender and age in years.

— Key in your weight in kg OR pounds, and height in cm OR feet-inches. Any combination will do.

— Select your activity level. Choose one that instinctively matches your current usual physical activities.

— Push the button [Calculate BMR & DCN].

* BMR: (basal metabolic rate, aka RMR — resting metabolic rate) defines the rate at which your body uses calories to power its basic metabolic functions. It equates to the amount of energy your body expends when you're lying down doing nothing but remains awake. You need at least this energy level to stay alive and function normally.

* DCN: Daily Calorie Needs = BMR + Additional physical activities

* SCI: Safe Calorie Intake. Your minimum daily calorie intake. Try not to reduce below this threshold or you will disrupt your metabolism and brain functions. Remember your brain needs calories (mainly from carbohydrate) to function properly, otherwise the adverse effects like I mentioned earlier will surface.

* SCDL: Safe Daily Calorie Loss. Your maximum calorie loss per day without adverse effects on your health.

Important: When your BMI scores less than 20 kg/m², you'll see SCDL = 0 and SCI = DCN. That's a safety feature I set to stop people from abusing their calorie consumption (which might harm their health) when they have already gotten such a perfect BMI. If you still feel dissatisfied with your figure because you got some loose muscle here and there, and having fat stored at places which you feel they shouldn't be there, then I suggest that you tone up your body with our Free Fat-Burning Workouts.

So, to begin with, assess your current daily calorie intake (you can do an averaging over a week) and compare with your DCN derived from above. Think about what changes you plan to implement in your meals to achieve DCN or SCI.

Be careful of any fad diets that give you short-term rapid weight relief. Losing weight at the expense of your health is definitely a stupid thing to do. I couldn't stress that enough.

As your weight drops and activity level increases, you'll get different BMR and DCN. When either one occurs, I suggest that you come back here to re-assess your body's calorie needs.

How Best to Eat for Weight Loss?

You need sufficient calories to survive. And you also need all-round nutrients to stimulate metabolism to burn fat efficiently. So, what can you do to get the best of both worlds?

Eating out of the "box" (prepackaged food from factory) or dining at restaurants can hardly guarantee the quality of food because you can't control:

• the quantity of salt and sugar they add,
• the type of oil they use,
• the number of times they reuse the oil for frying,
• the quality of ingredients,
• the level of hygiene in preparation, etc.

What's worse is that the cooking processes may have stripped off all the nutrients and left you nothing but trash. Moreover, you can't control the amount of calories in the food. Hence, I suggest that you go get some easy-to-prepare vegetarian cookbooks. Spend some time to go through them, count the calories and then try to put together a meal plan for a month or two. Then scurry into the kitchen and get busy.

But is it worth spending hours just to fix up a meal plan? How troublesome and time-consuming!

Here's the time-saver: Get Kardena's 90-day fat loss vegetarian meal plans. Everything is done for you. You get more free hours to work on your important tasks. You can start whipping up mouthwatering fat loss meals right out of the gate. No counting calories and carrying a log book around because each and every recipe shows you the exact amount of calories, carb, protein and fat containing in it so you have a clear picture of how much carb, protein and fat you eat. Amazing?

You might want to try out her 7-day vegetarian meal plan first (see green box below) before you commit to her 90-day vegetarian meal plan for fat loss.

After you sign up and while waiting for the free ebooks to deliver to your mailbox, let's go and see how you can step up your metabolism even further to burn more fat in the least amount of time.

Download FREE 7-Day Fat-Busting Vegetarian Diet Plan + Meal Plans Guide. Delicious & Healthful... You'll Love It!