Adopting a vegetarian or vegan diet is a fairly common weight-loss strategy, and it often works. Many of the staple foods in a plant-based diet have fewer calories and less fat than the alternatives, so it's logical that such a change in eating would help you slim down. However, converting to vegetarianism isn't a guaranteed way to lose weight, particularly if the switch is only temporary. Consult your doctor before beginning any new diet.
Benefits of Vegetarianism
Vegetarians tend to weigh less and eat less fat and fewer calories than nonvegetarians, registered dietitian Katherine Zeratsky explains on MayoClinic.com, most likely because they consume more fruits and vegetables. To stay at a healthy weight on a vegetarian diet, it's still important to eat balanced meals, but giving up meat for the long term could decrease your overall caloric intake and lead to gradual, consistent weight loss.
Calorie Deficit
Eating vegetarian for just a week isn't likely to build up the calorie deficit necessary to lose and keep off a significant amount of weight, however. It requires burning or saving a total of 3,500 calories to lose 1 pound, so you'd have to decrease your daily caloric intake by at least 500 with a meatless diet to lose that pound during one week. If you return to your normal diet at the end of the week, the best-case scenario is that you'd keep that single pound off, but the more likely situation is that you'll eat extra calories and gain the weight right back.
Low-Calorie Diet
If you're only willing to go veg for a week, it might not be an entirely useless experiment. You can cut your calories by giving up meat, and if you do so for every meal during the week, you'll get ideas for how to keep up the pattern in the future. Then, even if you only continue eating meatless meals for a few days out of each following week, you may still achieve slow but consistent weight loss. The key to weight loss is to eat a low-calorie diet, whether it includes meat or not. Treat meat as an accompaniment rather than a main dish, and make lower-calorie options such as whole grains, fruits, veggies, yogurt, tofu and eggs the star of each meal.
Considerations
To lose weight and keep it off, you must choose a diet that is sustainable, meaning you can keep it up indefinitely. Ideally, it should also be balanced and include a variety of foods from each major group. If you feel you can do that with a vegetarian diet, then it could be a healthy choice to adopt one; however, you can definitely eat meat and still lose weight. For the best results, make gradual changes and lower your calories step by step. The National Institutes of Health doesn't recommend that women eat fewer than 1,200 calories daily and men fewer than 1,500 daily, for example, unless you have your doctor's approval or are following a medically supervised diet designed for weight loss.
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