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Don’t eat “aminals.” Align your diet with your values: Eat plants, and leave the killing behind.

A
s much as the diet industry wants you to believe that there are all kinds of fancy secrets to losing weight, there really is only one: Burn more calories than you take in and the pounds will come off.

And if you are attempting to do that by eating less and exercising more, you’re just chasing your tail. And therein lies the beauty of eating plants. It’s a formula that makes sense for many, many reasons.

When you eat whole, plant-based foods, you are eating calorie-light foods that are wonderfully bulky from water and fiber as well as layered with vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals. When the bulk of the fiber, water, and micronutrients hits your stomach, it signals your body’s stretch receptors and the nutrient receptors that all is well in the world. When you eat meat and processed foods, however, you are eating calorie-rich foods that are empty of fiber, water, and micronutrients and don’t signal your stomach’s density and stretch receptors until it’s too late and you’ve overindulged—and still leave you micronutrient deficient.

Still, despite this easy formula, one in three American adults and one in six children are obese. There are many factors behind America’s supersizing, including an increased consumption of processed and restaurant foods, but the heart of the problem is that people are simply eating too many calories—especially calories from meat, dairy, and processed foods, affectionately known as C.R.A.P.—calorie rich and processed—a term coined by my friend Jeff Novick.

A 2009 study by Johns Hopkins University found that participants who ate the most meat consumed 700 more calories every day than those who ate the least. They were also 27 percent more likely to be overweight.

On the other side of the equation are the plant eaters. According
to a review of 87 studies published in the April 2006 edition of
Nutrition Reviews
, while obesity rates among meat eaters have skyrocketed, they’ve remained at between 0 and 6 percent among plant eaters. On top of that, the study found that the body weight of male and female plant eaters was 3 to 30 percent lower on average than that of meat eaters.

The reason is clear: Meat and other animal-based foods are usually loaded with fat. That’s what made meat so handy as an occasional snack for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Fatty, calorific foods are great if you spend all day running away from saber-toothed tigers and don’t know when you will eat next, but not so great if spend your days staring at a computer screen and chowing down in restaurants. It’s a simple fact: More sedentary lifestyles require diets with less fat and more plants, which are nature’s low-fat wonders.

Let’s look at the amount of fat in foods with and without meat. How about a great bowl of Bad 2 the Bone Chili (
here
)? Throw in some lentils, kidney beans, a load of tomatoes and other veggies and bam! This bowl contains around 1 to 2 grams of fat. The main sources are the lentils and the kidney beans, which pack a minuscule 0.71 grams, totaling just 3 percent of your overall calorie intake.

Now let’s look at that bowl if you add one serving size of ground beef. It contains 22 grams of fat—a full 71 percent of the calories in the meat! Just by adding meat, you have created a dish nearly four times fattier than the original. And what’s a meat-eater’s bowl of chili without a good layer of cheese on top? Throw on a half cup of shredded cheddar for another 18 grams of fat. There is more fat in cheese than there is in the leaner types of ground beef!

You get the point. Anyone who says he or she doesn’t feel full without meat simply hasn’t eaten enough potatoes, brown rice, squash, black-eyed peas, or steel-cut oats—the bulk and fiber in these and other such foods (missing in meat) make you feel fuller on fewer calories.

None of this means that it’s impossible to get fat if you eat only plants. In fact, if you eat nothing but French fries, fast-food salads with oily dressing, and lots of refined carbs such as white bread, you may well get as obese as any meat eater. The point is that plants in their natural state are low in calories, low in fat, high in fiber, high in water, and high in micronutrients, and if you eat them intelligently, the only thing you’ll have to worry about growing big is your ego when you see how slim and trim you are.

T
he dieting world is full of magic bullets. The reality is they are all piggies wearing different-colored lipstick: low-carb, no carb, all carb, dark carb, net carb, blood type, caveman, Paleo, primal, cookie, warrior, monk, and a dictionary full of other made-up names to go with made-up claims.

What do these diets have in common? They don’t tend to work. The reason is simple: Most fad diets are based on calorie restriction (aka starving yourself). They dress it up in a lot of colorful costumes, but it usually boils down to the same strategy: Eat fewer calories than your daily requirement, and you will lose weight.

This is more or less true—as long as you don’t read the fine print stating that you will gain all your weight back when you start eating normally again. One of the most comprehensive analyses of dieting ever done found that almost everyone who followed leading fad diets eventually gained back whatever weight they had lost within six months (other studies have found the weight comes back within two years).

In fact, in some of the studies, being on a diet almost guaranteed that over time, a person would actually gain more weight than they had lost!

The real problem with fad diets (well, outside of the fact that they don’t work) is that they aren’t designed to be healthy. They are designed to make you lose weight. But you can’t keep the weight off unless you are eating healthily.

See where this is going?

Like a good soldier you follow the diet for a while, but eventually you break rank and return to overeating. Dieticians call this process “restriction-binge” cycles, and they lead to yo-yo dieting, or losing
weight and gaining it back again… and again and again. This kind of weight loss has been linked to a weakened immune system, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and diabetes.

The worst types of diets, such as crash diets, are starvation marathons with a bit of liquid allowed to fool your body into thinking it isn’t cannibalizing itself. Although you initially lose weight, in the long term you don’t because your body responds to starving by slowing your metabolism while eating into your muscles. Even when you start eating normally again, your metabolism remains depressed, causing you to gain more weight from less food. On top of that, these diets deprive you of vitamins and minerals, dehydrate you, and even weaken your heart.

Doing one once probably won’t hurt you, but doing it multiple times (essentially yo-yo dieting) has been linked to an increased risk of heart attacks. One of the original liquid diets, the “Last Chance Diet,” allowed for just 300 calories a day and was linked to sixty deaths from heart disease. As for the “cleansing” properties that these diets claim—well, hooey. That’s what you have a liver and kidneys for.

Fad diets that often limit or nix healthy foods are almost always based on gaga theories demonizing one specific nutrient in order to convince you that cutting it out of your diet is all you need to lose weight.

Take carbohydrates. Even if you ignore the fact that cutting out carbs and eating more fat and protein directly contradicts almost all the published health studies of the last half century, it is still completely bananas to believe that you can eat as much fat as you want as long as you limit your carb intake. It’s like saying you can smoke as much as you want, just stay away from sugar; that way you won’t get diabetes. But you probably will get lung cancer. The same goes for “no-fat” diets that let you eat as many empty carbs as you want as long as they say “fat-free.”

The truth is that fat, protein, carbohydrates, and all other nutrients are necessary in your diet, just not in excess. Removing any of them may help you shed weight, but will also add new problems. For example, despite the fact that most people who follow low-carb (or low anything) diets can’t stick with them in the long term, they do cause dieters to lose pounds… if they’re desperate enough. But most of the “pound a day” claims of low-carb diets are caused by dehydration. If that’s not your style, they can also induce
ketosis
, which is a biological state that also happens in diabetics when they don’t get enough insulin.

The biggest scams are the diets that come with a miracle food, like cookies, or supplement shakes, vinegar, or even hormones from the urine of pregnant women—I wish I were making that one up. Usually the people promoting these diets are—surprise!—the same people trying to get you to buy their miracle products. I can’t tell you how many women have told me that they are “professional dieters” and are looking for something, anything, that works and is sustainable.

What makes plant-based eating any different? For starters, it’s about eating, not starving. People on plant-based diets can eat lots and lots of delicious, wonderful food, but because the food is high in fiber and water content and low in calories, you’ll fill up before you fill out.

Next, plant-based eating doesn’t deny your body any nutrients in the name of weight loss. As long as you eat a nice variety of plants, you will get ample amounts of carbs, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals, micronutrients, and everything else your body needs, but you won’t get them in the excessive quantities that cause weight gain. For the first time in your life you’ll be getting healthy and beautiful from the inside out, the natural side effect of which will be sustainable and permanent weight loss.

Finally, once you switch to a plant-based diet, you won’t have to battle cravings or worry about your weight yo-yoing. That’s because it is low in calories and high in nutrients, so you won’t want to eat anything else. You will have a happy and heavenly relationship with your food!

I
’ve been following a plant-strong diet for more than twenty-six years and I’m 100 percent convinced that it’s the healthiest and most satisfying way to eat. But I know that few topics can rile people up as much as diet and food. I hope these chapters will give you all the information you need to flip meat eaters to plant eaters (especially if that meat eater is you!).

Collectively, we live in a society that still cherishes its meat. It will take some time before people come around to the benefits of eating plant-strong. Be patient. It will happen. You are a pioneer, an early adopter of a lifestyle that is becoming more and more prevalent. As Winston Churchill said, “America always gets it right, but only after they’ve tried everything else.”

Plant-strong is a concept whose time has come, and I want to thank you for being an agent of change in transforming your health and the health of this country. Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have!

On an individual level, this is a journey about building health. It all begins with eating whole, plant-based foods. Don’t make this more complicated than it has to be. Let’s not count calories; let’s not obsess over portion sizes; let’s not worry whether we’re eating two, three, four, or six times a day; let’s not make this about willpower. Let’s make this about plant power, my broccoli brothers and strawberry sisters! Let’s just make this about eating simple, whole, plant-based foods.

I want you to push out the processed and animal-based foods by piling up your plate with plants. This way you’ll have zero room for anything else. I want to challenge you to have a plant-strong meal so big it needs its own zip code. I want you to explore how much you can eat of
these clean, low-calorie foods before your tummy receptors decisively let you know you’ve had enough to eat. I want you to start mainlining the fruits, veggies, and legumes like they are your drugs of choice because guess what: they are!

Let’s stop the human suffering and step up and challenge the doctors who keep people locked in the circle of insanity with drugs, surgery, endless tests and procedures, and a bad diet.

Don’t be afraid of change. Let the plant-strong lifestyle show you a world where anything is possible—a world without prescription drugs, lethargy, ill-health, chronic disease, and sickness. Where you go from here is a choice I leave with you. Take it. It’s yours!

And now on to the best part: the food. Coming up are more than 140 amazing recipes that are the cherry on top of the moo-free sundae—all plant-sensational, with healthy fats and no added oils. I’ve found that even if I don’t always win my plant-strong argument—every now and then someone is stubborn—all I have to do is feed them, and suddenly a grin breaks over their faces and they see the plant-strong light! Split Figs with Cashew Cream and Caramelized Onions (
here
)! Anne’s Pumpkin Muffins (
here
)! Bad 2 the Bone Chili (
here
)! Hold on to Your Hat Steel-Cut Oats with Kale (
here
)! Raise-the-Barn Butternut Squash–Vegetable Lasagna (
here
)! Grape Tomato, Fresh Mint, and Watermelon Ball Salad (
here
)! Bittersweet Chocolate Truffles (
here
)!

Here’s a fact I’ve found to be always true: It’s hard to lose an argument when you’re stuffing your opponent’s face with the best food on earth!