arkie6

Hi Angeline,

What I was saying about the junk food is avoid partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. Most high polyunsataturated fats (corn oil, soybean oil, cottonseed oil, etc.) should also be avoided in my opinion due to their unstable nature and tendency to oxidize. Saturated fat (butter, coconut oil, palm oil) are naturally stable and healthy. Monounsaturated fats like olive oil and canola oil to a lesser extent are also good choices. If you want to know more about good fat vs. bad fat, do an internet search for articles written by Dr. Mary Enig. Basically, any fat that was available for human consumption 100 years ago is probably healthy.

It's not really the fat in your diet that makes you fat, but the sugars and starches that raise insulin levels and get converted to fat. How do they fatten a cow or hog for market? Feed them grain (high in carbohydrates). Which are the leanest animals in nature? Predators that eat little if any carbohydrates.

And for long term weight loss I recommend weight training over cardio because the increased muscle mass will burn more calories 24/7 than the cardio workouts and most people are able to stick with it long term. Plus it improves your appearance in my opinion. I don't mean to go overboard with it, but just build a little muscle mass by doing resistance exercises. It can be as simple as push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, arm curls with dumbbells, etc. But if you are not eating enough protein on a vegan diet, then you don't have the building blocks (amino acids) to build muscle mass. And soybean products are not a viable protein source in my opinion, so what are you to do? Alan S.

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The tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. T H Huxley