Can LeafSide meals be used as a weight loss solution?

Thank you for your interest in LeafSide! Our meals are 100% whole food plant-based, and anecdotally, some LeafSiders have reported excellent results with our meals and their weight loss journey: https://www.goleafside.com/kudo-topics/optimal-weight/weight-loss/ 

As a food company, please note that we cannot give personalized medical advice. We highly recommend working with a licensed lifestyle medicine professional (RD or MD) who can carefully review your situation and make a recommendation. In general, a whole food plant-based (WFPB) diet has been shown to greatly help with weight loss, depending on individual lifestyles.

One can lose excess weight in the short term on a very wide variety of diets, but what matters is keeping the weight off, i.e. long-term, healthy, and ideally easy weight management, where we’d simply eat delicious and nutritious foods until we feel full.

That need for easy long-term weight management implies eating meals that are nutrient-dense: delivering all the macro, micro, and phytonutrients needed for good health, while avoiding excess energy density, i.e. avoiding calorie-rich foods that are nutrient-poor and bypassing our natural satiety senses (because they have no fiber), like saturated fats from meat and dairy, oils, processed sugar, etc. From epidemiology and clinical research, plant-based diets best fit those requirements.

Only a diversified whole food plant-based menu fits those requirements of high nutrient density while avoiding excessively high caloric/energy density. Put another way, eating minimally processed, fiber-rich foods best allows our natural satiety signals to work, while also being long-term sustainable because 1) the eating guidelines are very simple to follow, and 2) the meals are fully nourishing.

In fact, the highest average weight loss ever recorded in a randomized controlled trial (aka RCT, the “gold standard” for evidence-based health studies) without restricting calories and without exercise, long-term (6 months and 12 months), was achieved with a whole food plant-based diet — in the BROAD study. Participants who were simply educated about WFPB (not provided meals or food) for 3 months, and told to focus on eating as much WFPB as they could, lost an average of about 12 kg (26 pounds) by the 6-month mark, and kept that result at the 1-year mark too!

Dr. Greger has some great videos on the topic of weight loss, summing up the current state of the art:

Evidence-Based Weight Loss – Live Presentation
& “The Plant-Based Diet” by Dr. Greger TEDxBismarack

See also: A Whole Food Plant-Based Diet Is Effective for Weight Loss by Dr. Greger

We hope this is helpful, and are all looking forward to serving you!