Popular Diet Comparison: The Cabbage Soup Diet

Popular Diet Comparison

Lose 30 pounds in 30 days! Lose 10 pounds a week and eat all you want! We’ve all seen these statements – miracle diets that claim to have you losing large amounts of weight with little to no effort, or on the flip side, diets that ask you to deprive or starve yourself in order to see results. And if you want to lose weight, these miraculous claims can certainly seem appealing. But many of these diets are not realistic in the long term (or even healthy in the short-term!) and if you are serious about achieving healthy weight loss/maintenance for life, then it requires a life-time commitment. 

Here we’ll go through some of the more popular diets out there – what they are, how they work, what to expect, some unbiased pros and cons and then our own evaluation and rating (good, bad or ugly) based on the safety and effectiveness of each. At the end, we hope that you’ll be able to make an educated decision regarding the healthiest and most effective diet for you!

Popular Diets:

• The Atkins Diet
• The Cabbage Soup Diet
• The Blood Type Diet (aka Eat Right 4 Your Type)
• The Zone Diet

The Cabbage Soup Diet

Official Site: No official site, as no one has claimed credit for creating this diet, but you can find the basic information at: www.cabbage-soup-diet.com

Overview:

The idea behind the cabbage soup diet is to jump start your weight loss, as you can lose between 10-15 pounds in a week if you follow the diet exactly. You can eat as much cabbage soup as you want all week, and each day of the week long program has specific foods to be eaten as well. For example, on the first day you can eat all the cabbage soup and fruits that you want, but no bananas allowed, and on Day 6 you’re encouraged to eat as much beef and leafy green veggies as you want (and of course, the soup), but no potatoes.

How it works:

The theory behind the cabbage soup diet is similar to that of the ‘negative calorie diet’. These diets works on the basis that you have to burn more calories than you consume in order to lose weight, so if you only consume foods that have minimal or ‘negative’ calories, you will lose weight. The cabbage soup recipe has negligible calories and is considered a ‘fat burning’ soup. So on this diet, you can have as much soup and water as you want and still lose weight. The additional foods for each day are, for the most part, also low in calories and contribute to the ‘negative calorie’ effect that will lead to the desired weight loss.

Length of program

One week – it should not be followed for longer.

Expect to eat a whole lot of:

Cabbage, cabbage, cabbage – as well as fruits, veggies, or beef, depending on the day of the program.

Say goodbye to:

Variety in your meals, anything pre-packaged or processed, sugar, milk and bananas (except on day 4 when this, and the soup, are all you can eat).

Pros:

• Easy to follow and very little cooking. Most days consist of the soup and certain other whole, uncooked foods.

Cons:

• Very restrictive both in food choices and calories, which make this diet very difficult to follow precisely (and you will become very bored with cabbage soup by the end!)
• Because the weight loss is an end result of starving your body of calories, the results are only temporary and the weight will come back once your regular diet is back in place.
• Many people who have tried this diet report feeling light-headed and weak, and notice a decrease in ability to concentrate .

Thoughts on the Cabbage Soup Diet:

If you need to drop the weight for a one-time event and it has come down to trying the cabbage soup diet or just starving yourself, then I would recommend this diet – it’s a small step up from eating nothing at all…but not by much.

This diet is much too low in complex carbohydrates, fat, protein, vitamins, and minerals to continue for an extended period of time, and even if you only follow it for a week, the results you see will be temporary. You cannot lose 10 pounds of fat in a week – the weight you’re losing with this diet is water weight or muscle – neither of which is going to help you in the long run. And to make matters worse, you might even end up gaining more weight back than you started with! Your body is smart and after a week of nearly starving it of valuable nutrients and energy, it will store anything and everything it can from the food you eat, just in case you starve yourself again (your body always wants to make sure it has something to live off of). When your body is storing all of these things, you'll find yourself gaining weight again rapidly, sometimes more than you initially lost.