Quote:
Originally Posted by rhcp0
How would you explain that some people thrive on vegetarian diets?
I try all different diets and can't find a good one. There is always price of hunger I need to pay to keep slim. Do you think tha is price some people just need to pay? I listen to a few podcasts on nutrition a day and read a lot but for some reason your opinion makes it more clear what is right in the ocean of information.
Where do you get your information from besides robb wolf, ben greenfield?
There's a sense in which every diet "works", in the short term. This has actually been really well-documented. Everything from vegan/vegetarian, paleo, gluten-free, Zone, Atkins, low-fat, low-carb, juice-fastingyou name it. It kind of all works in the short term. The reason is because diets generally work on elimination. What happens is that when people make a commitment to not eat X, whatever X might be, they generally improve the quality of their food. They eat out less and prepare more food at home. They buy less processed/packaged food at the grocery store, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual diet.
One simple example is say pizza, whether out of the frozen food section or Domino's. Vegans won't eat it because of the cheese. Paleo won't eat it because of the bread. Low-fat won't eat it because of the fat content. Low-carb won't eat it because of the carb content. So whatever diet you're on, you end up substituting something that fits in the diet, which is almost certainly going to be healthier than the Domino's. Repeat this example over and over (ice cream, fast food, whatever) multiple times a day for three weeks and people are going to do better.
There are lots of other reasons why every diet works well in the short term. Placebo effect is a huge one. The fact that you think you're doing something well for yourself likely reduces stress, which will make the pounds come off. Additionally, people who go on diets often get social support from their peers/loved ones and those types of bonds are generally beneficial for lifestyle.
Yet another reason is that cycling off virtually everything is probably fine in the short term. We are creatures that are built to survive and in fact thrive to some extent with some scarcity. Ancestrally, if we found ourselves in a patch of land where it was hard to hunt, well, we became vegan for a few weeks. Similarly if we were in an arid area without much vegetation, we'd be low-carb meat eaters (or eat very little at all). If we stumbled into a patch of land where fruit was plentiful, we would probably gorge ourselves on that fruit for a while, until the seasons changed and the trees started producing. So you can see that elimination diets correspond in a way to this scarcity that we're adapted to, even if (and perhaps especially if) the thing that's being eliminated is fairly random/arbitrary. So again whether the diet is low-fat, low-carb, low-protein, low-sodium, gluten-free, vegan, or whatever, you're naturally cycling off some nutrients for a while which may lower digestive stress and create better well-being. So even the most devout meat eater will likely do well in the short term going vegan.
I do think in the long run vegans run up against a number of huge nutritional deficiencies. B12 is most commonly talked about but there's research that many people do not convert plant-based EPA/DHA well in their bodies. These are critical and there's no way around this because you'd have to eat an obscene amount of algae to get the amount of EPA/DHA (after conversion) you'd get from a couple fish oil caplets or a can of sardines.
As for being hungry all the time, no, you definitely shouldn't feel hungry all the time. You should feel hungry maybe a couple times a week. Try shifting ratios towards fat, as it tends to be more filling. Also something like a BCAA supplement may be useful on low-calorie days.