Lifestyle
Don’t Measure Your Food, Measure Yourself
Counting Your Food is Tedious, But Quantifying You is Easy
Portion Sizes
This book’s focus on practical veganism means doing without standard diet cookbook approaches such as counting calories and carbs, or measuring food weights and portion sizes. All of this micro-measuring isn’t very practical, and undermines the book’s theme of setting up a dietary regime and routine for easy everyday eating.
The recipes of course give appropriate indications of ingredient ratios, tablespoons and grams of course, but let’s say you make my seaweed soup — is that 2 or 4 portions? Well, it depends! How large are your bowls? How hungry are you? How many meals or people do you want to spread it across? For me, practical veganism means not micromanaging all the possible quantities one can count.
It’s hard to gain weight when making balanced and varied meal plans out of the recipes, and very easy to lose or maintain weight with it, so relax and try to go with the kind of casual practical flow that this diet allows for.
A low carb diet vegan done right — by which I mean practically, that delivers great nutritional value overall, and that matches your goals of weight loss, weight maintenance or caloric restriction — is one in which you can just eat whatever you want, whenever you want, as much as you want, as long as you are staying within the parameters of the diet paradigm.
A good rule of thumb is to eat until you’re 80% full (this idea comes from the Blue Zone philosophy of eating for longevity). Keep in mind which meals have more or fewer carbs and fats, and skew towards the former if weight maintenance is your goal and the latter if it is weight loss.
Measurements
If your goals are weight loss, the approach in this book is not so much about measuring grams of carbs and fats or kCals or portion sizes in the recipes. Rather, just measure yourself, by every morning stepping on the scale and getting a soft tailor’s measuring tape to measure your waistline. Everyday, write those two numbers down in a spreadsheet in adjacent columns (the rows are the days).
Pay attention to those numbers in relation to what you are eating, to develop some mindfulness about the effects of the food you eat on these two measures (weight and waistline). If you want to lose weight and those numbers are not coming down, cut back on the amount of vegan cheese (or skip the meals that have them, or eliminate that one ingredient), and the same goes with vegan meats that are higher in carbs and fat, and which may take you out of ketosis or calorie deficit. Don’t eat the chocolate chip muffins for every meal, etc.
Eating and measuring like this in tandem produces amazing insights into how your body interacts with your food. For example, in my case, I simply cannot lose weight while eating the phyllo dough low carb pizzas I describe, but I won’t gain weight eating them, either, and so they are better for goals of weight maintenance.
Everyone’s body is different, and since your weight and waistline are the two ‘metrics that matter,’ track those two numbers daily against the meals you eat, and you should find the best combination that helps you stay on track with your goals.
Once you’ve reached the desired level of weight loss, since overall the meals in this book are low calorie — especially when compared to what you get in restaurants or the prepared foods in delis and grocery stores — the recipes should work fine for maintaining your new weight.
Expect setbacks, as likely there will be days when the numbers are trending in the wrong direction. If you find yourself putting a bit too much vegan cheese into your pasta or stuffed peppers, skip the cheese, and so on. In the recipes that follow, the main ‘guilty parties’ when it comes to interfering with weight loss are vegan meats and cheeses, and with a few recipes, melted vegetable margarine or coconut oil.
And so, don’t eat meals with coconut milk in them everyday. Daily measuring of your weight and waistline will help you sort out which ingredients and meals are friendliest to your weight and calorie goals.
Ketosis and Caloric Deficit
Ketosis is a metabolic state where your body switches to another energy pathway, getting energy from ketones from the breakdown of fats instead of glucose derived from carbohydrates.
Getting into a state of ketosis requires eating very few carbs per day, often expressed in guidelines as no more than 20 grams of net carbs but that will of course vary by your body size and your metabolism etc. You can check to see if you’re in ketosis via over the counter tests such as strips that measure ketones in your urine or through blood or breath tests.
Caloric deficit simply means that in a given day, you’ve burned more calories than you’ve consumed, which will also force the body to burn fat. A low carb diet supports both strategies for weight loss. If your goal is ketosis, minimize those ingredients in recipes that have more carbs or eat smaller portions for meals (for instance. eat 2 instead of three slices of low carb toast for breakfast). If you fail to get into a measurable state of ketosis, you can still lose weight via calorie deficit.
This book’s philosophy is that constantly measuring everything isn’t very practical for everyday low carb vegan eating, so ultimately it’s a matter of crafting meal plans that let you easily achieve your goals with minimal hassle. The recipes that follow which are a bit higher in carbs are clearly labeled as being more appropriate for cheat meals or weight maintenance rather than daily consumption with weight loss in mind.
Those ingredients that are potentially higher in carbs and fat are also indicated so you can tweak the amounts you add to your versions of the dish (such as the aforementioned vegan ground chorizo, using it for flavor for weight loss goals versus getting more meaty satisfaction from it if your goals are weight maintenance).
