Is being a vegan all about losing weight?

Being a vegan is a popular diet nowadays. For many they have found that the diet helps them lose weight, have more energy and have better skin. It’s a fast way to eliminate negative aspects from your diet such as cholesterol and fats, particularly saturated fats. True there are many nutrients that are taken away from your diet that are naturally sourced from animal based products, such as protein and calcium. These nutrients can easily be sourced through supplements in the form of vitamins. However, with all aside, is being vegan all about losing weight?

For the vast majority it isn’t.

The main reason behind the majority of people becoming vegan is to do with animal rights. When looking into how meat is produced for us to eat you find that a lot of it is done with a lot of cruelty. The animals are kept in harmful conditions and are then killed after a short period of living to be made into mass-produced food. The vegan diet doesn’t just stop with the killing of the animals but how make get other animal based products. Products such as milk, eggs and honey. None of these foods require killing any of the animals that make them but that doesn’t stop them being kept poorly. By being kept poorly I mean that each breed of animal is put into small spaces. For instance with cows to produce milk they are genetically manipulated to produce 10 times more milk then they naturally would for the sake of mass production.

You’re now probably wondering, ‘What about the food production companies which have animal welfare?’ ‘Would that make it okay for a vegan to eat?’ ‘Is it all about the cruelty behind food products?’ ‘Or is it about the freedom for the animals as well?’

For vegans the diet is about the freedom for animals. It’s about treating people and animals as equals. This is why when asked, ‘If animals eat other animals, why can’t we eat them?’ Veganuary.com answered this by saying that we can’t compare ourselves to wild animals. Humans have more of a moral standing than wild animals do so we can have much more an impact and responsibility behind what we eat.

But is it all really needed?

Arguments such as, ‘Is honey vegan?’ is a common topic brought up. When farming honey from bees they tend not to be harmed within their hives but it’s the principle behind it. Even though many researchers found that taking the honey from the bees is replaced with sugar supplements, which harm the bees due to the lack of nutrients from it. Not only are the bees making the honey they are also eating the honey for themselves and their colony. It’s a fair point saying that they aren’t being physically harmed in any way so it shouldn’t be a bad thing if we eat honey even if it is an animal based product but we are taking away something that is theirs for their kind.

When looking into the vegan diet you find that there is much more to the reasoning’s behind it than losing weight. There are much more morals and values behind why many people are vegan. When people think of dieting you think of weight lose automatically so its natural people would think that for the vegan ‘diet’. However there is so much more depth and meaning to the diet due to a vegans morals behind not wanting to harm animals and stop animal cruelty due to the condition in which they are kept, whether or not they are killed.

The ethics of this diet are in the hope that more and more people will catch onto it and that animal based products production companies will end so that the animals making them will not need to be kept in captivity in any way and purely be free to be their own kind. The levels in which you take on the diet are based on your own personal preference. Many people start as vegetarians and move on to being vegans to build their diet and education on the cause, which spans further away from what you eat and to being a lifestyle.