i have been a vegetarian for almost 6 years. when i first gave up meat i love some where around 15-20 pounds. i gained it back after a diet that is mostly based on bready foods. i dont take any vitamin supplements. i was wondering if there were vitamins that were needed to lose weight properly.
There aren't any vitamins or supplements that are inherently needed for vegetarians to lose weight, but there are certain foods and food combinations that do seem to contribute to helping your body lose weight. A new line of research seems to indicate that a natural hormone in your body called 'leptin' is strongly correlated with weight loss, and certain foods create resistance in the body to leptin, making it difficult to lose weight. There's a great book called "The Fat Resistance Diet" which details the science behind leptin resistance -- this area is picking up a lot of support in the medical literature -- and includes specific foods and recipes to decrease leptin resistance (and its related factor, tissue inflammatory syndrome) that can dramatically increase the body's ability to lose weight and keep it off. The only catch is, the book is not geared toward vegetarians. I believe that it would be possible to make the pro-leptin diet work for vegetarians, but I haven't looked into it in detail. One other book you might check out is "The Diet Cure." It deals more with people who have strong cravings for sweets, fatty foods, etc, and talks about how many of those cravings can be addressed simply by adding specific amino acid supplements (amino acids being building blocks of proteins) to your diet. Hope that helps.
A balanced diet provides most of the vitamins you should need but taking a multivitamin daily helps- especially if you are a vegetarian. There's not much connection between vitamins and weight loss. The problem with breads in the US is that they are made from processed wheat flour instead of whole grain flour. Processed flour digests very quickly which raises blood sugar levels rapidly. This is often responsible for weight gain and water retention from diets that are high in breads.
