How Eating for Weight Loss Can Help You Save the Environment
Weight loss is an admirable goal, especially when done to improve one’s health rather than just their appearance.
That’s especially true now that more than 2.5 billion people worldwide are considered overweight. Of them, roughly 890 million are obese. That’s one in every eight people, an increase of almost double since the ‘90s. This development is especially concerning given the strong link between these weight conditions and chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
Though there are plenty of methods touted as solutions to losing excess weight—such as fad diets—they’re often unsustainable in two senses of the word. Aside from being unhealthy and unscientifically proven, they can increase your carbon footprint. Fad eating plans like the Atkins diet alone emit nearly six times more carbon than the EAT-Lancet food targets for planetary health.
In truth, clinically significant weight loss of 5% or more of one’s body weight can only be achieved through healthy eating and regular exercise. But can these be both good for you and the environment? The answer is yes. Workouts alone can inherently promote greener lifestyle practices, like walking or cycling over driving. But what about eating for weight loss?
What does eating for weight loss look like?
Calorie restriction is undoubtedly important for weight loss. By eating less and burning more, you’ll effectively shed pounds. However, solely focusing on calories can negatively impact your health. That’s especially true when it comes to fad diets like juice cleanses or Paleo.
These encourage you to prioritize some food groups while completely cutting out others for the sake of calorie restriction. By neglecting nutrition and your unique biology, they lead to deficiencies that harm your health as you lose weight.
In contrast, a truly healthy weight loss program focuses on nutrition so you can tailor weight loss to your specific needs and preferences. Such plans instead ask you to change your mindset by thinking of food not as “good” or “bad,” but “nutritious” and “less nutritious.”
It thus bypasses calorie restriction to guide you toward foods that you want to eat and are good for you. In that way, eating for weight loss becomes more sustainable in the sense that you can uphold it as a long-term habit. At the same time, it’s more sustainable for the planet.
How can it help you save the environment?
It steers you away from processed foods
Because ultra-processed foods like cakes and chips are ready to eat, they’re more convenient and thus comprise roughly half of the calories we consume. However, their production uses a significant amount of water and raw materials—and their packaging generates plastic waste down the line. That’s not to mention they only contain “empty” calories without nutritional value.
Instead, their added sugars, refined carbohydrates, and excess amounts of sodium contribute to weight gain. In other words, ultra-processed food production takes up planetary resources to create products that don’t actually contribute to our health. In contrast, eating for weight loss encourages you to consume whole, unprocessed foods rather than ultra-processed ones solely because the latter provides more nutritional value.
By doing so, you can help save the environment by lowering the demand for the resource-hungry production of unhealthy ultra-processed foods.
It promotes sustainable ingredients
What specific foods do you need to eat for weight loss? The answer lies in the likes of the Mediterranean diet, which is followed in the world’s Blue Zones—where you’ll find high proportions of centenarians in local populations. These people live longer than average because their diets, aside from avoiding ultra-processed foods, are primarily plant- and fish-based, prioritize healthy fats, and minimize the consumption of sugar and sodium.
According to Harvard Health, they’re thus among the healthiest weight loss diets. The reason why such eating plans are also environmentally friendly is because they encourage you to consume less red meat and dairy—food products notorious for producing high greenhouse gas emissions.
Instead, they promote the consumption of locally sourced fruits, vegetables, fish, and whole grains. Aside from being nutritional powerhouses, these reduce the need for herbicides, pesticides, and food transportation, immediately making eating for weight loss better for the environment.
It encourages meal-prepping
A healthy weight loss diet calls for more mindful—not restrictive—eating, which is why you’ll see better results when you consciously select what goes into your diet. That’s why many weight loss programs promote meal prepping. By cooking what you’ll eat a week in advance or more, you can control portion sizes, reduce food cravings and temptations, and customize the ingredients you use to suit both your nutritional needs and your taste buds. At the same time, we note that meal prepping is sustainable.
Because it affords you more control over what you eat, it minimizes food waste and lets you experiment with more sustainably grown ingredients. In doing so, you also more efficiently use those ingredients to reduce your carbon footprint. You’ll only buy and cook what you need, so you’ll make fewer trips to the grocery store—lowering transportation-related emissions.
With more people worldwide overweight and obese than ever before, many are looking to lose weight for better health—and the best part is that the best diet for the job can also help you save the environment.
For more on sustainable living, keep reading here on Green City Times.