success story: erica loses 110 pounds
Erica recently shared her incredible story about how making changes to her already-vegan diet made her healthier and happier. Check it out:
In January of 2011, I was laid off from my job. After about a week of feeling aimless, I needed to feel productive, so I decided to tackle the problem of my poor health. I weighed 268 pounds and though I had already been vegan for a few years, I was most definitely a junk food vegan and pretty much lived on French fries and cookies. I felt like I needed to take control of that part of my life since the career portion was out of my hands.
I cleaned the junk food out of my cupboards and replaced it with whole foods... fruits and veggies from the Farmers Market just a few blocks away, whole grains, legumes and all sorts of delicious but healthy things. I also started working out with videos and eventually joined a gym. In the first month, I lost eighteen pounds and had more energy than I ever had before.
Fast-forward one year and here I am, 110 pounds lighter and happier than I ever thought possible. I ran my first 5k last year and have a few more races planned for this year. I've been hired to host nutrition and fitness workshops for a physician's office. I'm also going to work on obtaining certification to become a personal trainer. I love, love, love cooking and if I'm not in the gym, at work, or with friends, you can usually find me talking about food on my blog (though it's not a cooking blog) or scouring other blogs for the next delicious recipe to experiment with.
After
I considered myself a happy person before this transformation but I never dreamed that it was possible to feel this good and full of life and energy. I truly believe in the power of healthy, whole foods and the impact nutrition and exercise can have on a person's life. My life has changed dramatically in the past year and I couldn't be more excited to continue down this path and see what this next year has in store!"
Erica! Congratulations on your weight loss and your life change.
If any of you kind lifers have a success story you'd like to share, private message me or post a note to your profile and like it. I may feature you on the homepage of The Kind Life.
25 comments
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She looks wonderful! Very, very encouraging...I have a weekness for french fires and cookies too. Helps to see someone overcome that struggle and go beyond.
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Hey Rhiannon,
I personally lost weight on a whole food vegan diet. However there are plenty of vegans with weight problems so I have continued to do research on what exactly leads to weight loss.
The best evidence that I have seen so far is that refined carbohydrates are what cause weight gain. These spike your insulin level and insulin is what directs your body to store fat. Consume too many refined carbs and most of the calories your consume will be stored as fat. As this energy is not available for other cells in your body this can leave you energy depleted - leaving you tired and hungry. So you eat more and move less - and the cycle of weight gain continues.
If you don't eat any carbs you cannot put on weight - insulin is only produced in response to carbohydrates. Fat and protein do not make you fat.
So the trick in losing weight on a vegan diet is to consume complex, slow digesting carbohydrates. That means avoiding sugar and refined carbohydrates such as flour and also avoiding starchy vegitables such as potatoes. It also means avoiding processed foods - the more processed the more easily digestible - even cooking, grinding, blending and juicing increase the digestibility of foods. Orange juice will induce a more agressive insulin response that eating a whole orange.
You can look up the glycemic index or glycemic load of foods for a indication of how they aggressively will affect your insulin levels. You can also includes more foods with higher protein and fat content. It's looking like fat isn't the villain it has been made out to be - so try adding more high fat plant foods to your diet such as nuts and avocados to your diet. There is some speculation that high fat diets may be safer than high protein diets.
Mark Osborne - www.veganhealthandfitness.com
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Hiya
Amazing story - you are an inspiration. I have been a vegan for about 5-6 years now. I ran a marathon last October, and slimmed down quite a lot, but since then I have piled on the pounds. I eat quite healthily (the occasional cake etc. but try and incorporate as much fresh fruit and veg in my diet as possible) but it's mainly eating double portions of dinner that gets me! Do you have any tips for helping will power and cutting portion size? I've been trying to stick to this meal plan http://vegetarian.org.uk/guides/vplan01.html for about 2 weeks (it's all vegan food), but just had syrup in my coffee :'-( it's hard to have will power sometimes!!! Good on you, thanks for sharing your amazing story xxx
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Congrats!
You were beautiful before and you're beautiful after. What an amazing story. This makes me want to work hard to lose my weight. I have a goal of 60 lbs and hopefully, I'll be able to accomplish it. If I have any problems, looking at your journey will keep me on track! Thank you for being such a role model to everyone :)
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Congrats on all your hard work. You should be very proud of yourself. Not just for the weight loss. Getting your life together and then helping others do the same is a wonderful thing.
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Congratulations! Another person proves that a whole plant based diet works as described by Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., Dr. Neal Barnard, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Dr. John McDougall, Professor T. Colin Campbell, and numerous other distinguished nutrition researchers. For me it required no feeling of hunger or deprivation. You feel so alert and alive while eating right that the feeling becomes the motivation to stay on this diet. I lost 90 pounds on this way of eating. Former President Bill Clinton announced that he lost 24 pounds before his daughter's wedding. Dr. Esselstyn made the recommendation to for former president because of a heart condition.
It's sad the many sponsors of this web site promote junk food that is vegan but unhealthy. But, who's going to promote the consumption of kale?
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Erica,
You look absolutely gorgeous, and so happy!! Congratulations and nice job!! I'm so impressed by you. I'm sure you are an inspiration to everyone in your life. Take care.
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You should be so proud of yourself, I know we all are very proud of you...keep up the good work. PEACE
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Kudos to you! You took your life and health in your own hands...that's the best Valentine's gift you could have ever given yourself.
Gretchen
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I am so happy for you Erica! Your story is both amazing and inspiring, thank you for sharing. I think it will help a lot of people who (for whatever reason) are vegan, but like you mentioned a "junk food vegan" take that step to better health.
Really when it comes down to it whether it's the economy or something else that we have no control over, but to some degree has control over us, our health & well being is the one place we shouldn't skimp on.
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Hey everyone! Thank you for your kind words! You have all definitely made my heart happy today. Can I just say that this website has the most awesome people contributing to it?
The address of my blog is peasandloveandlife.blogspot.com and I would love for you all to visit!
Happy Valentine's Day everyone!
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Congratulations on your success Erica! I think the question eveyone wants to know is where can we go to read your blog?
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How wonderful! She looks fantastic and so happy! I definitely need to cut back on the french fries and cookies as well.
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Congratulations Erica. Losing 110lbs is an impressive achievement.
I've been thinking about the whole healthy vs. unhealthy vegan diet recently and the way that you have changed your diet exemplifies the difference.
An unhealthy vegan diet contains lots of refined carbohydrates and relatively few non-starchy vegetables. A healthy vegan diet is based on whole foods with very few refined carbohydrates.
Historically the introduction of refined carbohydrates to a population is correlated with increased rates of diabetes mellitus, obesity, cancer. And scientific studies are showing that low glycemic index or low glycemic load diets have positive effects on diabetes, obesity and lipid profiles.
So sticking to whole foods and avoiding refined carbohydrates appears to be the most important thing you can do to make your vegan diet healthy.
Mark Osborne - www.veganhealthandfitness.com
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You look wonderful and such an amazing achievement, the fitness and races. Yay you! :D
I agree would be lovely to read your blog. I haven't been a vegan long but sometimes feel restricted and in bit of a rut. Even love I spend a lot of time walking.
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What an unbelievable jouney you have taken yourself on - you will be an inspiration to so many more people. You took what could have been a bad situation and used your time to turn your life around. I applaud you and would certainly be interested in reading your blog.
Happy Valentine's Day Erica!
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What a wonderful story of triumph Erica, and you bring up a very prominent problem that I have noticed with some vegans... the very sugar-loaded, carb-driven diet. So happy you took charge of things and began to look to "good" foods that sustain life and feed your blood. You look amazing. I myself have had a long battle of food allergies, being raised in an Italian household and finding out in my late 40's after gaining 90 pounds that nearly EVERYTHING I was eating I was essentially allergic to! I have had to change my ways and rethink Italian! I am now blogging about it... Stories like yours need to be told! Thank you so much for sharing.
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