My personal experience with various vegan diets – HCLF, Raw, High-Protein, Low-Carb

My personal experience with various vegan diets – Low-carb or low-fat?

Here I share with you my personal experience with various vegan diets. Please read my conclusions at the end of the post too.

OK, let’s see my few years-long experiments with testing various popular vegan diets.

I am a researcher by training, I like to do experiments, even on myself. So I tried some approaches to see how my body reacts to certain changes in my diet.

What I found after these experiments is that it’s better to simply listen to my body than to follow diets. Our bodies know what is best for them and it can be completely different for you and me. Also, don’t be surprised if you find your food preferences change as you age or go through different life stages (puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause, menopause).

Important note:

These weight gains and losses are 2-3 kilos, not much really. The time frame of the described personal experience with these vegan diets is about 15 years, so I don’t often change my diet significantly. The aim was just to experiment and find a way of eating I enjoy the most and can sustain in the long term, while I’m healthy, happy, slim, have enough energy and my skin looks good. I know, I have a “few” requests 🙂

High-fat, low-carb

First of all, I can’t tell you much about really high-fat diets as I can’t stomach them. Probably because I don’t like fatty food at all. Ok, that’s not entirely true, I like plant whole food fats, like avocado, nuts, coconut, and nut butter, but in moderate amounts. Too much of it makes me feel sick and lethargic and it feels like there is a big stone in my stomach. It’s important to listen to our bodies. I know people who love fatty food. That’s not me.

High-protein-low carb

After my first pregnancy, I lost the baby weight with a moderately low-carb, higher protein (animal protein), and a moderate-fat diet. It worked, I lost the weight and I had enough energy but I was impatient and irritable (lowering carbs does that to me) and my skin looked horrendous. My acne was so bad I couldn’t leave the house without slabbing foundation on my face.

High-carb low-fat vegan

After my second pregnancy, I used a plant-based high-carb low-fat diet to lose weight. It was nice to eat all those potatoes and rice (I’m not that keen on pasta, I know I’m weird), I was really calm, but I had to keep my fat consumption very low to be able to lose weight. My acne cleared up but my skin was extremely dry. I felt itchy all the time because of my dry skin and my family members told me that holding my hands felt like holding a crocodile. Not good 🙁

High-carb, low-fat raw vegan

Then I tried the high-carb, low-fat raw vegan lifestyle and I absolutely loved it! I was the thinnest I have ever been, had tonnes of energy, my skin looked good, and enjoyed the unlimited amount of fruit that I could eat. I am a fruit bat, love fruit, and missed it soo much during low-carbing. I have to add though that mentally I felt less stable than usual. I ate raw for about a year and then high raw (about 70-80%) for another year.

The problem was that I had to travel quite a lot due to business and conferences. There I couldn’t eat raw, it was difficult to eat even plant-based food most of the time.

It was more and more difficult to go back to eating raw after weeks of eating vegan junk food during my travels. I was starting to gain a bit of weight. It was also tiring to cook for the family something that I don’t eat and make sure that I always had enough ripe fruits. It was especially hard during winter.

Plastic Free Produce Bags – Set of 3

Cooked vegan, low-fat, high-carb

I decided to go back to cooked food, at least partly. I ate fruits for breakfast and one cooked and one raw meal a day and fruits for snacks. This worked very well for a while but then I started eating more and more cooked food, even though it made me tired. My reasoning was that it was much easier to cook a big batch of food than preparing all the raw salads. I could eat them quicker too. At work, I didn’t have time to eat a huge salad for lunch. I got home late and again didn’t have time to make and chew a huge salad that I used to eat.

Avocado Huggers – Set of 2

High(er)-protein vegan

I wanted to gain some muscle and lose some fat, and bodybuilders do that by eating more protein. Protein satiated me when I ate a higher (animal) protein after my first pregnancy. I thought I would give it a try, but this time with plant proteins. Hopefully, they wouldn’t give me acne. I kept the carbs and fat moderate.

Well, my moderate carb probably would be high-carb for a low-carb dieter and my protein would be too low 🙂

It works for me and I have been eating like this for years now. It’s actually a balanced approach, having protein, carbs and fat in my meals and not restricting any of them. I stopped following diets and I eat whatever I feel like eating and what feels good in my body. I recommend you do the same. Read my important conclusions below too.

So this was my personal experience with various vegan diets.

Conclusions

As you can see it’s possible to lose weight (or maintain it) with any of these lifestyles. I only adjusted my eating style over the years because of skin conditions, energy, convenience, and curiosity. This way I found something that is the best for me in the long term. Maybe for you, something else is the ideal way of eating.

You can also experiment to find a way of eating that gives you the most energy, fits into your lifestyle and helps you reach your happy weight. But please DON’T do anything obsessively and you definitely need to eat ENOUGH so you are not hungry all the time and think about food constantly! Restricting your calories too much and not eating enough makes your survival brain freak out and it will drive you to overeat and binge eat later and gain all the weight back. This leads to yo-yo dieting, which is really detrimental to your health. See these posts:

In fact, you don´t need to try these extreme vegan diets at all

I´m a researcher, I can look at changes in my body as data and analyze them but you are not trained to do this. I actually wouldn´t do this again with the knowledge I have now (and didn´t have back then).

Now I know, that you only need to develop a few healthy habits and stick to them in the long term to be able to lose weight successfully and permanently. This is what I teach in my Healthy Habits for Permanent Weight Loss course. This course is designed in a way that you will lose weight WITHOUT being hungry all the time, dieting, counting anything, and spending your life in the gym (you don´t need to go to the gym at all if you don´t want to).

Instead, you will learn which lifestyle and thinking habits help you lose weight sustainably and permanently, how to stick to them in the long term while loving and accepting your body, and getting free from all your food issues (e.g. cravings, evening/weekend overeating, emotional, stress, and binge eating, hormonal imbalance, and weight loss plateau).

If you are interested, check it out HERE.

Emotional and binge eating support

So many people know exactly what they should eat to be healthy and slim but they always self-sabotage their efforts. They eat healthily for a few days or weeks, but then something happens and they give up before they would reach their goal.

Or they reach their goal but then they return to their old habits and gain all the weight back. And they don’t know why they are doing this over and over again and they would like to finally stop.

If you have this issue please consider contacting me here or here.

My How to Stop Eating Your Feelings workbook can also be a huge help for you to break free from emotional eating, overeating, and binging. You can also read a free chapter below.