The Problem of Getting Sufficient Calories to Maintain Energy and Body Weight

Any diet with insufficient calories is going to crash sooner or later (usually sooner). On an insufficient calorie diet people become thin, drawn, and just generally unhealthy. Calories are the nutrient we need every day to get thru the day because they are our immediate source of energy. But the rest, vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, essential fatty acids, etc etc... we can get those essential needs met over the course of weeks from a variety of whole foods.

So on a low-fat, whole food, vegan diet the problem is getting enough calories. Most people get most of their calories from fat. Calories in fat are very dense, in other words a small quantity of fat has a lot of calories. This is why, on conventional high-fat diets, if one eats enough to "get full", they will have eaten a lot of calories, too many in fact to easily maintain a healthy body weight.

On a low-fat vegan diet there are two primary sources for "enough" calories, fruits, where the cals come from simple carbohydrates mostly, and starches, where the cals come from complex carbs. (The cals in whole veggies are minimal, but those foods are rich in other essential nutrients.)

Bananas are the potato of the fruit world: they are versatile, cheap, readily available, and rich in calories and other essential nutrients. Depending on ripeness they can have quite a bit of starch (less ripe), and spotted bananas have converted the starch to simple sugar.

Contrary to the current but incorrect meme, insulin resistance is not caused by sugar, it is in fact caused by free floating fat in the bloodstream, which is what happens on standard diets getting most cals from fat. Fat in the blood inhibits the uptake, transport, and delivery of fuel to the cells (fuel is glucose and oxygen in combination), a problem known as insulin resistance. If one insists on continuing with a conventional high-fat diet the only solution to this problem is to reduce carbohydrate consumption to nil, converting the bods primary fuel source to fat, a condition known as ketosis. This is the basis of the so-called Paleo diet, or the earlier Atkins diet. However it's not as efficient or healthy IMHO as simply getting the fat out of the blood to begin with.

Check out this book, a low-fat vegan approach, but less "radical" than the 100% raw Doug Graham version. It uses cooked starches as the base, for sufficient calorie intake.

"The Starch Solution"

http://www.amazon.com/Starch-Solution-Regain-Health-Weight-ebook/dp/B007PF7MGS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407765640&sr=8-1&keywords=the+starch+solution