People often consider a vegetarian diet to be healthy, and of course, a diet packed with fresh fruit and vegetables will be great news for your health and weight. Famous vegetarians include Pamela Anderson, Demi Moore. Brad Pitt and Cheryl Cole and it’s certainly done their bodies a lot of good! What people often don’t realise though is that a vegetarian diet can be packed with hidden fats and sabbortage our diet.
A lot of vegetarian recipes use fats such as butter, oil and cream to add flavour and create a more pleasurable texture. Clearly this massively increases the caloric content of even the simplest meals.
Milk, cheese and yoghurt are loyal companions to a vegetarian diet because they’re great sources of protein, calcium and vitamin D. However, these foods are often made with full fat milk, most of which is saturated fat. Saturated fat clogs your arteries and can lead to heart disease. For example, most cheeses contain seven to nine grams of fat for every ounce, and an ounce is about the size of your thumb.
By virtue of not eating meat, many vegetarians lack protein in their diet and nuts and seeds are a great way to correct the balance. What many people don’t realise is that they are loaded with fat. The good news is, the fat is the healthy unsaturated kind, which can help prevent heart disease but will still pile on the lbs if you over indulge.
We’re always being told to load up on vegetable and fruit juices to get our 5-a-day but sometimes these can be a hidden source of calories. One apple has about 80 calories, yet an eight-ounce glass of apple juice contains 120 calories. Eating fruits or vegetables satisfies our hunger much more effectively than drinking juice because the fibre in fresh produce makes us feel full.
Solution: Drink water to satisfy your thirst. Eat at least two servings of fruit and three servings of vegetables every day.
Diet trap 5: Fast food
This is a diet trap anyone can fall in to because lack of time means we’re tempted by crisps, chips, fizzy drinks and chocolate. Even vegetarian ready-made meals that seem to contain a lot of vegetables can be packed full of fat and salt.
Solution: Avoid eating ready-made meals where possible and stick to natural, unprocessed foods. If you really can’t avoid using them then don’t fall for a ‘healthy-looking’ package. Always read the nutritional content of every meal and be wary of the calories, vitamin, mineral and fibre content of all fast foods.
I agree.
Be vegeterian is be healfy and theres nothing that you can’t say to change this, and I kwon this because I’m a 17 years old vegan, and I’m more healfy now than seven years ago,cause a start to be a vegeterian when I was 10 years old, and also I start to be more inteligente and flexible, now I can do the split, and I coundn’t when I was 6 years old and I had ballet classes, so be vegeterian have vantages, a lot of, but don’t have any disaventage, so learn how to live with that, and vegeterians aren’t vegeterians because they want to be slim, but becaude they want to be cruelety free and because they love animalzs, just like me.
I am a vegetarian and after reading this im going to be a bit more careful of what i eat. thank you
I followed a strict vegetarian diet when I was younger and lost a stone in 4 weeks. It wasn’t easy though, and I did crave meat for the whole month x
I have to say I found this a sensationalist article, suggesting that a vegetarian diet can be packed with diet pitfalls. So is it okay to nosh on fast-food, juice, cheese, butter, oil and cream if you eat meat?!
Wholegrains, most vegetables and pulses (peas, all types of beans and lentils) are good sources of protein, and tend to be lower in calories than the nuts and seeds which you recommend!
Perhaps you should write an article about the benefits of a vegan diet. I have been a vegan for the past 3 years and my skin, hair and nails have improved, I have lost weight (yippee!), I have more energy and have never felt healthier. I don’t get that nasty bloated feeling when I eat anymore. With my experience of veganism, I would never go back to eating anything remotely animal based.