Language not only allows us to express ourselves but it also helps with our thought processes. Perhaps on Day One of your vegan journey, you don't need a nitpicking, lecture on semantics. IMHO that is exactly when it's needed. Unless your main goal is "striving to reduce animal exploitation" you are following a vegan lifestyle. However, that does not make you unwelcome here. And a lot of us here are pretty well informed on plant-based nutrition. Heck, that's all any of us eats!
I think the term you should start using and thinking with is "whole food plant-based". It's a diet. Not a lifestyle. Its main objective is not animal rights but personal health. It
can include small amounts of animal products. It
does exclude oil, salt, and sugar. (Vegans do not include any animal products and the vegan diet does not necessarily exclude oil, salt, and sugar.)
However, the vegan "diet" is compatible with the WFPB diet. And in fact, many vegans have adopted it. Lots of the forum members identify as WFPB. BTW, neither the vegan lifestyle or the WFPB diet is "weight loss diets". However, both can be modified to be weight loss diets simply by counting calories and creating a calorie deficit. The good news for you is that the WFPB diet can not only be easily modified to create weight loss but a lot of information is out there on how to do just that.
There is a ton of free information on the WFPB diet. I'm a reader and my first instinct is to hit the library. If you use a keyword search for "whole food plant-based" or just "plant-based", you will get lots of good reading suggestions. Most of them will be from the Forks Over Knives people. If you just read the FOK books you'll end up with a full understanding of the WFPB diet.
The thing is that some authors have "re-packaged" the WFPB diet in order to sell
their books. And their books don't include the words plant-based or vegan. Probably the two most popular WFPB books fall into this category. They are Dr. Fuhrman's
Eat to Live, and Dr. Gregar's
How Not To Die. I've read them both and the FOK books. And it really doesn't matter which one you read. Fundamentally they are about the same.
Including all the FOK books and its spin-offs, there is no shortage of good info. I would say that an argument could be made that there is too much info. but I would counter that argument with that you could just about pick any of these books at random and start there and you could implement a WFPB diet successfully. In fact, just one book may be all you need to read.
According to Fuhrman, you don't start your EatToLive diet until you have finished the book. I'm not sure any of the other authors make that demand. but it's not bad advice. However one of the main enemies of any dieter is procrastination and this requirement may just lead to further procrastination. As an alternative, you could just look up someone else's meal plan and follow that. I think all the WFPB diet books include meal plans. There are also some good meal plans online.
Here is one.
And if your personality is one that is more comfortable with the How-Tos than the Why's, then just follow a meal plan like an instruction book.
There is also a lot of good YouTube videos on this subject. While I was looking for one to recommend I discovered this page in my favorites. this could be THE place to start your journey.
https://www.forksoverknives.com/pla...rs-guide-starting-plant-based-diet/#gs.11bzzw
Good luck. and let us know how it goes.