Do Legumes Aid in Weight Loss? [Food Options and Advantages]

Individuals are continuously seeking for the best weight loss meals.

It is incredibly difficult to maintain a healthy weight in today’s food world, so the obsession with discovering the miracle pill for weight reduction is reasonable.

How do we lose weight?

Changing your food is the biggest lever you can employ to influence your body to lose weight.

Even if you may burn more calories by increasing your physical activity, focusing on your food as the key component will increase your chances of success.

Instead, select a sustainable, nutritious, and pleasurable diet that will enable you to continuously eat at a calorie deficit while preserving your general health and pleasure of life for the greatest outcomes.

Many individuals believe that some diets are better than others for losing weight.

It’s common to hear that keto diets, for example, are better for weight reduction since they restrict carbohydrates.

Some individuals believe that restricting your meat consumption can help you lose weight more effortlessly.

Others insist that low-fat diets are the weight-loss holy grail.

Yet this is just not the case.

The truth is that all diets operate by producing a caloric deficit, in which the amount of energy lost by your body exceeds the amount of energy coming in via what you eat and drink.

Therefore the key to long-term weight reduction is the ability to maintain a calorie deficit without badly impacting your general health or making you feel so hungry and unhappy that your diet becomes unsustainable.

With this in mind, your dietary selections while trying to reduce weight should be largely nutrient-dense and low in calories.

If you want to lose weight, avoid empty calorie items that are rich in dietary energy (fat and carbohydrates) but poor in nutrients.

Items with high nutritional value but low calorie cost should be the foundation of your diet.

Let us begin by analyzing the calorie composition of a few regularly consumed varieties of legumes.

The figure above clearly shows that peanuts are highly rich in calories.

Lentils, black beans, and chickpeas have substantially lower calorie counts.

Peas offer the fewest calories per 4-ounce serving size.

Nevertheless, eating for weight reduction needs a little more depth than merely comparing calorie counts for various items.

You should also think about the notion of hyper-palatable foods.

We are hard-wired to seek palate novelty, according to Robb Wolf. Novel tastes, textures, and combinations, like prostitutes and cocaine, are rewarded by the dopaminergic areas of the brain.

Essentially, current ways of processing meals and constantly coming up with novel tastes, textures, and flavor combinations result in extremely addictive foods.

Side note: this is critical in food engineering to encourage you to eat (and so purchase) more and more.

That’s why the Pringles slogan is “You can’t eat just one!”

As an example, consider a favorite legume.

As the chart above shows, peanuts are already incredibly calorically dense.

Nevertheless, processing those peanuts into smooth, creamy peanut butter makes them even more appealing.

What if additional tastes are added to the peanut butter (chocolate, salted caramel, etc.)?

The food’s palatability and chance of being overeaten have just skyrocketed.

Almost no one has the self-control to stop at just one spoonful of peanut butter.

To provide another example, chickpeas on their own, merely cooked with salt, are not very appetizing.

It may even be difficult for you to finish the whole serving, and you are unlikely to be persuaded to return for more.

However chickpeas mixed into a paste and served as a dip for corn chips is a another matter.

You could easily consume many times as much as you would if you were simply eating regular chickpeas.

Peas, on the other hand, are often eaten simply, cooked with some salt.

It becomes much more difficult to overeat them in that situation, and they are already low in calories, making them more suitable for a weight-loss program.

Lentils are abundant in nutrients and low in calories, making them an excellent option for a weight-loss diet.

Lentils are also rich in fiber, making them quite filling.

Eating satiating meals is a good option if you want to lose weight since they will make you feel full even if you are eating at a calorie deficit.

Lentils, of course, are abundant in carbs. 1 cup cooked lentils has 40 grams of carbs.

Lentils are not a suitable option if your chosen weight reduction plan is a low carb or keto diet.

From a nutritional standpoint, lentils are fairly comparable and provide equal quantities of calories.

The main distinction is that red lentils contain less fiber than other kinds since they lack their outer shell (which is mostly composed of fiber).

Since rich fiber meals are satiating, increasing your fiber intake may be a helpful weight reduction approach.

Red lentils, on the other hand, offer a substantial quantity of fiber (22 grams per cup), hence the difference between lentil kinds is minor in terms of weight reduction.

Eating plain lentils for a week will probably make it simpler to maintain a calorie deficit since lentils are not inherently very appetizing food and contain lots of fiber to keep you full.

As a result, if you just eat lentils for a week, you will almost likely lose weight.

This technique, however, is not one I would encourage.

Eating solely lentils is not a viable long-term weight reduction approach. If you prefer lentils, adding them as part of a well-balanced diet that you can stick to for a long time is your best chance.

Lentils include a moderate quantity of protein, a considerable amount of fiber and carbohydrate, and very little fat.

The macronutrient breakdown for 1 cup cooked brown lentils is as follows:

Cronometer app screenshots

Lentils are often promoted as a high-protein diet, but there are a few things to bear in mind when consuming protein from plant sources. First, getting protein from lean meats, if feasible, is more calorically efficient.

Lentils include 18 grams of protein, 40 grams of carbohydrates, and 230 total calories. Yet, to acquire 18 grams of protein from chicken breast, you would only need to consume 104 calories.

Second, animal proteins include all of the necessary amino acids, but plant proteins often lack one or more essential amino acids.

Lentils, in instance, have a low methionine content.

Lentils are strong in folate, which is an important vitamin during pregnancy for avoiding neural tube abnormalities in babies.

Lentils have a lower level of other vitamins and are deficient in B12, which is one of the most frequent nutritional deficits globally (especially in vegetarians and vegans).

In terms of other vitamins and minerals, lentils are high in copper, phosphorus, and potassium.

Lentils are a nutrient-dense meal that should be taken with animal protein (if feasible), necessary fatty acids (from meat, eggs, or a fish oil supplement), and vitamins and minerals found in whole foods.