I Ate Vegan for a Month

I’m as Texan as they come–I love barbeque and chili and Tex-Mex (and chicken fried steak, and on and on). But when we finally crawled out of 2020, I was 10 pounds heavier and needed a break from the usual rotation.

My last book, The Fad Proof Diet, is all about not doing anything extreme but instead taking an accurate inventory of your intake and making adjustments based on your preferred food choices.

So, it’s with astounding hypocrisy that I went vegan for a month. But I wanted to see how a few things went, and my wife was happy to go along for the ride and help out with the cooking. Here’s what happened.

First off, I easily lost 10 pounds in four weeks. As I say in the book, vegetation is very low calorie but high volume, so eating more plants can fill you up without packing on the pounds. I ate quite a bit of almond butter, which is calorie-dense, but when one isn’t eating the afore-mentioned Tex-Mex, a little almond butter is the least of your worries.

Next, I lost some muscle. I’ve been lifting weights with my son on the weekends, and we had been maxing out on bench press several weeks in a row leading up to the new year. Over the month, my max dropped about 10%.

That’s a bummer. But not a surprise–protein is the building block of muscle, and I wasn’t eating nearly as much of it as usual.

Overall, I enjoyed the experience of being a little uncomfortable for a month. We tried new recipes, and there were plenty of meals we made I’ll happily eat again.

But I did miss the Tex-Mex. 

In the future, I’m trying to focus my attention on leaner meats but keeping plenty of vegetation on my plate. And if you happen to be carb-phobic, you’ll be interested to hear that there were plenty of nights when I ate a big pile of roasted potatoes with some herbs and olive oil, and the weight still came off by the day. 

I could tell from the way my belt fit from one day to the next that I was dropping inches, and from one week to the next, I lost a little over three pounds.

Again, I don’t advise going full-on vegan (or any other diet that’s not sustainable for you–and going vegan wouldn’t be my long-term preference). But since I went for it, I thought I’d write about it here.

My biggest regret is that I didn’t do before/after bloodwork to see what happened with my cholesterol numbers. Maybe next time.