Cabbage Soup Diet Recipes

The cabbage soup diet has earned its place in the dieting hall of fame, but it’s important that you know what you can and can’t achieve with it.

Like anything in life, there tends to be a correlation between risk and reward. Some diets are essentially designed to be long-term lifestyle choices – ways of gently dropping the pounds at a rate of one or two a week and then maintaining your ideal weight by means of a healthy, sustainable and well-thought-out programme of nutrition. This isn’t one of those.

Make no mistake, the cabbage soup diet is effective. In the course of that one week you can expect to drop between ten and fifteen pounds, and some people report even more.

You achieve this simply by putting your body into a state of near starvation – stick to the diet and you’ll be running a calorie deficit of somewhere in the region of 1,000 to 1,500 calories per day. There’s no mysterious ingredient in the soup, as some sites and fans of the diet claim: it really is just simple biology. Stave off the hunger pangs enough to stop you running wild in the cake aisle of the supermarket and that kind of inexorable maths has no choice but to take its toll on your excess body weight.

That it works is beyond doubt: you’ll come out of the week the better part of a stone lighter than you went into it. But there are downsides. Medical professionals view this kind of diet with near horror. First off is that you’re basically starving yourself, which comes with a number of health warnings. It’s unsurprising that many cabbage soup dieters report feeling dizzy or faint, or suffer from headaches. Lack of energy means you’re strongly advised not to exercise for the week of the diet.

Since most restaurants and cafés won’t cater to your needs, you won’t be eating out much during this week. But given the lack of energy and the digestive impact of daily unlimited cabbage soup, you’ll probably need to stay in a lot anyway. The diet is undeniably monotonous, although it is only for a week, which makes it manageable – especially if there’s a special occasion you’re looking forward to looking and feeling slim for.

Perhaps the biggest point to remember is that this is really a quick and dirty fix. It’s a crash diet: nothing more. Cabbage soup is not a long-term plan – in fact, you really can’t stay on it for more than a week at a time without running the risk of malnutrition and other problems from the lack of calories. It does nothing to address any underlying eating habits, lack of exercise and other lifestyle factors which have led to you putting extra weight on in the first place.

Plus, whilst some fat will be burning off, there’s a school of thought that says it’s practically impossible to lose that much fat so quickly, and that most of the weight loss is just water. Coupled with a post-diet binge brought on by a week of boredom, that’s likely to mean a lot of the weight goes straight back on afterwards – cabbage soupers are notorious for being some of the worst yo-yo dieters around. In that respect, it’s better as a kick start to give you a bit of confidence at the beginning of a more balanced and sustainable diet.