Low carb vegan - is it even possible?

[NotDonna]

I’m currently doing Low Carb bootcamp and am very much an omnivore. However, Ive just been watching the ‘documentary’ with 4 sets of twins testing healthy omnivore V healthy vegan (there were carbs everywhere). I’m just wondering if anyone has given it a go or is vegan and given low carb a go? Is it remotely possible?

Wow hitting the proteins needs with 2kg of spinach, for just 460 calories, isn't that amazing!!! and 44 gr of fibre. The microbiome is getting a feast. Folate, vitamin A, C , K all through the roof. Magnesium 500% of daily needs.

Sarcasm aside. If you eat your calories on a vegan diet, you eat your proteins. That was @NotDonna 's question and the answer is so simple. And no Doritos do not count as food.

And @NotDonna is quite right to have health concern when it comes to meat twice or more a day and every single day. Not even considering the distress and horrors of the slaughterhouse and our poor planet. Meat a couple of times a week, is more than enough.

You can slim down without having to eat meat meat meat. Your skin will look better, your inflammation will be better, and the list goes on . Make yourself a poké bowl with red cabbage as a base, and a selections of vegetables and some seeds. done. tasty, healthy. Edamame is nice.

It can be done but is difficult.
But before you go all in vegan, watch Zoe Harcombe on youtube here,
And also any of her talks on the develpment of the dietary guidelines.

And for more info on where all the push for veganism and the money behind the studies on vegetarianism, watch Belinda Fettke.

Also, try lowcarbdownunder for more info on 'healthy' eating, and for analysis of the EATLancet study here .

Thanks @Unabletomitigate i have a good look at those!

It seemed very vegan-focussed from the offset. They also didn't mention any of the damage to the environment in mass-producing fruit and veg like avacados, pesticides etc or the impact of us not sticking to local fresh seasonal produce and eating fruit and veg imported from Peru, Chile, Africa, Asia etc.

Aldi have a nice range of tofu now. Quite cheap. They do plain tofu and smoked tofu. Now also they have an onion marinated tofu too.

If you wanted to be low carb and vegan you would have to think about where you will get your calories from. We need about 2000 a day. Protein might be a problem. Soya is good protein but like all pulses it's got starch too.

You'd have to get a lot of your calories from oils. Traditional Cretan cuisine involves a lot of olive oil, they got most of their calories from olive oil. They thrived on it but there are other oils such as rapeseed. Avocadoes are rich in oil too.

I have heard that many oils have too much omega-6 in them to be healthy. Not the ones I mentioned though.

@HollyKnight thanks for replying.

i don't have a problem with curry/veg for breakfast at all. I just get fed up of the same food over & over whatever time of day.

normal wraps are too high in carbs for me. I do buy the 'simply' ones, but they're fairly £££ as is their bread. Plus postage unless I order a lot. I don't have much freezer space etc.

Can you recommend any good vegetarian curry books that don't rely on pulses? I know I can just leave the meat out of any, but many seem to rely on the meat to absorb the flavour & without that, they're not great (at least when I make them anyway!!). I have a great supply of spices!

Soups are generally too high in carbs for me & less filling than just the veg to eat.

yep cheese cheese & more cheese.

im suffering from terrible fatigue & i dont enjoy cooking, so dont really want meals that take a long time to
orepate.

if I wasnt low carbing I'd happily eat marmite on toast for dinner or a tin of soup in a mug.

yeah after 10 years I'm fed up!!

@notacooldad thank you for the link. I'll definitely try some of them!

if anyone sees my low carb wagon can you please tie it up & pm me the location?!

@herewegoroundtheblueberrybush
y body didn't. 3 years of vegan and nope definitely didn't lose weight.

(I didn't do it for weight loss though. I only reverted to vegetarian because I was travelling a lot & could manage to get vegetarian food, but vegan I was basically just not eating, so I stopped being vegan & stressing out about whether the food was vegan or not.

A vegan diet will almost certainly help you lose weight anyway as per the documentary,

The omnivores in that series also lost weight!

Both groups were given nutritionally balanced healthy diets - not mounds of vegan chocolate, crisps and (vegan) chips, for example.

I've just been on Zoe Harcombe's website and I'm quite angry. She's obviously someone who distorts facts to support her point of view. Consider this.

"Olive oil has 14g of saturated fat per 100g of product; United State Department of Agriculture example food – pork chop, boneless, raw, lean and fat – has 1.5g of saturated fat per 100g. Not that any real fat is better or worse than any other, but just to correct much nonsense said about both olive oil and red meat."

It has been known for a long time that pork fat (lard) is different from the fat of other animals such as cattle or sheep. Whereas most animal fat is (mostly) saturated fat, lard contains a lot of monounsaturated fat.

So when she chooses the pig as an example she clearly wants to imply that it's true of meat generally. She also implies that the main selling point of olive oil is that it is low in saturates: that was never true. The main selling point was always that it is high in monounsaturated fat. So what is this 'nonsense' that she seeks to correct?

We know that dairy fat despite being saturated does not contribute towards heart disease. We know that lard isn't saturated fat and therefore also doesn't. What we don't know is what effect beef/lamb/chicken/turkey fat has.

The whole focus of ‘fat is bad’ is 40 years out of date.

I actually put weight on eating vegan because it's so carby. I did it for ethical reasons so it wasn't my goal but it was bloody hard. I actually ended up reintroducing fish because I just couldn't keep eating pasta potatoes and rice. I totally get there are delicious veg meals and I don't like dairy or eggs so for me it wasn't much effort but it's bloody hard to lose weight that way. The show was bizarre in its attempts to come across balanced. As someone who actually already knows a lot of the terrible conditions and repercussions of raising animals for slaughter i wasnt expecting it in this title, you know what you're getting with cowspiracy for example, but I hope that means it reached a wider audience and encourages people to cut way back.

I low carb as a vegan. It's not easy but It's doable.

I've been vegan 22 years and although I am only slightly overweight and usually stay slim, it definitely doesn't make you lose weight!

I always think anyone who says that has forgotten about bread, chips, rice, pasta, hummus, guacamole, oils... and that's LONG before you get into the fact that there's so many vegan 'products' now and a lot of chocolate and sweets! How does it make you lose weight?! Unless you're one of those who thinks It's just lettuce and lentils (lentils being not very low calorie themselves anyway)!

'We' don't need 2000 calories. Some women may do, but a small, slightly built woman wouldn't, or probably any woman under 5'6 or so. I'd be huge if I ate that much!

Aldi tofu is nice, Lidl's is better value though I think, much larger packs of it for £1.99.