Vegan Weight Watchers – It’s not an oxymoron
Most people stereotype vegans as skinny people with a ashy grey complexion. That couldn’t be further from the truth. And just because I like to crack open ridiculous stereotypes, I going to explain how vegans these days can actually be overweight! Yes it’s true. While we like to believe that vegans eat only salads with non-fat spritzer dressing, that’s simply not true. The fact is food manufacturers have perfected the art of making just about everything that comes from animal sources just as good or even better in vegan form. Some of my personal favorites are Veganase which is like mayonnaise, almond cheese, Tofutti sour cream, Tofutti cream cheese, I could go on …. What this shows is that in our wonderful vegan world – with a plethora of food choices at our finger tips (well that may be a stretch) – we are now seeing overweight vegans.
What can we do about it? Is vegan obesity going to be as bad as regular obesity? I highly doubt it. While vegan “meat” type foods still have fat, overall they are typically less fatty than true cow flesh or chicken flesh. However our dairy substitutes, I’m sad to say can be higher in fat than actual dairy products. Take yogurt for example. Most soy yogurt has 3-4 grams of fat while there are many dairy choices that have 0 grams of fat. I digress. Silk if you’re reading … please make a non-fat, non-dairy soy yogurt! Is that too much to ask? Thanks!
My point is that I thought as a vegan I could eat whatever I wanted. That worked for a while. It may be that I turned 30 just about a year ago and my body stopped producing muscle as everyone says or it may be that there are just too damn many great tasting food choices out there for vegans. In fact I never really loved food until I became a vegan. Dairy made me sick. Meat looked disgusting. I had major issues with food. However as a vegan, I love everything I eat … feel good about it and it makes me feel good. This love affair has caused me some trouble. I gained 7 pounds so far this year. YIKES! Now if I gained 7 pounds every year it would only take me a short decade to be 70 pound overweight.
After stepping on the scale last week, I decided it was time to do something about it. My good friend Jenn recently lost a bunch of weight using the Weight Watcher’s program. I tried it this summer and gave up after 3 days. I’m not a number crunching kind of person. I tend to think of myself as the creative type. You know what that means … I can’t remember or keep track of my keys much less the calories in everything I eat! Well finally that seventh pound really got to me and I humbly asked Jenn for help. She has been so inspiring and motivational! I feel very lucky to have such a good friend.
I’ve been holding strong for 4 days on Weight Watchers. I’ve lost 2 pounds. At this rate, I only have 3 weeks to go to reach my goal weight then I can go into maintenance which I think will be a little easier. I know some of you may think this is silly worrying about 7 pounds but I never, ever had a problem with my weight before. I took one look at the scale and saw myself a decade into the future with a 70 pound gut. You know how hard that would be to carry around? So I thought better to get it under control while it’s still a relatively easy number to deal with.
Now you can all look forward to not only great vegan recipes on this blog … but also recipes that are ideally low fat … well we all have to have a good cupcake now and again … but maybe just not every day 🙂
I have some vegetarian WW point friendly on my free website. Feel free to copy them and save them here if you’d like. I’m not vegan and honestly don’t know if my recipes are perfectly vegan but I’ll leave that to you.
http://www.monicasrecipes.com
Josie! You are so smart to address this before it gets out of hand. Just ask me!
I’m very intersted in results. Keep us posted.
yummmmy…… thanks to your suggestions , i’d love to adhere to your blog as generally as i can.possess a nice day~~