The Big Healthy Soup Diet: Nourish Your Body and Lose up to 10lbs in a Week. Linda Lazarides

       WHY SOUP?

       Although some weight-loss plans involve special techniques like cutting out carbohydrates, most people still tend to think of eating fruit and salads as the best way to lose weight. Apples, lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes are very low-calorie foods. You can fill up a whole plate with these items and still consume only 100 Calories. It seems logical that if you eat only 100 Calories for lunch, you must lose weight…right?

      Well, maybe. The big problem is that most people who use this approach can’t stick with it for very long. After bingeing on chocolate a couple of times and giving up the diet in despair, these individuals (and you are probably one of them!) usually blame themselves for their ‘weak willpower’.

      In fact, we now know that there is a very good reason why this type of diet is doomed from the start. Salad foods are cold. Too much cold food can make you feel depressed, especially if you are a chilly individual and feel the cold easily. Depression is also a ‘rebound’ effect of excessive deprivation. It leads to an overwhelming desire for comfort

      (1,000 calories = 1 Calorie or kilocalorie. Throughout this book the word ‘calorie’ refers to ‘kilocalories’.)

      foods—most of which are, of course, loaded with excess calories. This is a physical desire. It has nothing to do with being greedy or weakwilled. Your body is desperate to get warmth and energy and it forces you to crave foods that will quickly satisfy those needs. Modern weight-loss science isjust beginning to recognize this problem, and to work with it rather than against it.

      Traditional Oriental wisdom has understood the problem all along. In Oriental medicine, too much raw or cold food would be considered to encourage weight gain as it depletes the body’s ‘fire’ or Yang energy (metabolism). Hot chunky soups made with lentils and moderately flavoured with garlic, onion, cayenne, chilli and ginger are much more energizing. Oriental experts believe that such foods burn off excess water in our bodies, and this is of course very good news for sufferers of water retention—a common cause of overweight. Don’t overdo these spices—burning your insides would be counterproductive and unnecessary.

      The warmth of soup makes you feel full as salad rarely can. Soup itself is a comfort food. But owing to its water content and healthy ingredients, this is a low-calorie comfort food and there is no problem with extra helpings. You won’t eat any more calories than in the average salad. But the results are far superior:

      SOUP RESEARCH

      Even scientific researchers agree that soup has some very special properties. In 1999, Barbara J. Rolls and Elizabeth A. Bell of Pennsylvania State University discovered that feeling full doesn’t need to depend on the number of calories you eat. If you know how, you can feel full just by making each calorie more filling. How do you do this? By adding hot water to your food to make soup! In this study, 24 young women were fed a 270-calorie appetizer of chicken-rice casserole—first on its own, second with a glass of water, and finally by adding the glass of water to the casserole and serving it up as chicken-rice soup. Then the researchers measured how much lunch the women ate afterwards. The results were incredible. After the casserole or the casserole/glass of water they proceeded to consume 300 calories for lunch. But after a bowl of soup, they could only manage to eat 200 calories. That’s a one-third reduction! Nor did they get hungry earlier or eat a bigger dinner later! It seems that when water is incorporated into food the body becomes satisfied much more easily.

      This is a whole new area of weight-loss research, and several more studies are summarized at the end of this chapter. It is another interesting fact that, according to the research, chunky soups are more effective in controlling appetite than smooth, pureed soups. All this helps to explain the success of the Cabbage Soup Diet made famous by Dolly Parton. But cabbage also has some special properties of its own, as you will find out later. The Big Healthy Soup Diet includes five new and delicious recipes for cabbage soup.

      INGREDIENTS THAT KEEP YOU FEELING FULL

      With the right ingredients, soup can be even more satisfying and keep you full for even longer. It can also help to balance your hormones, and this is essential when you want to burn off your body fat.

      Three ingredients that help weight-loss when added to soup include:

      Fats and Oils

      It’s just so easy to say ‘Fats and oils are high in calories so cut them out and you’ll lose weight.’ This only makes people start cutting out the fats they can see: butter and margarine, cream, cooking and salad oils, meat fat and even the skin from chickens. In fact, eaten in moderation, none of these are a problem. It is hidden fats—the fats you can’t see— that really pile on the pounds. Foods with large amounts of hidden fat include:

      For instance, have you ever read a recipe for making chocolate brownies? Most brownie recipes contain even more fat and sugar than they do flour. Every portion of pastry or pie-crust you consume probably contains at least two tablespoons of pure fat. You can’t see it, but just try pressing a few crumbs on a piece of paper and see the grease spots appear. Burgers can easily consist of up to 70 per cent invisible fat. Burger meat can quite legally be described as ‘lean’ even if it contains up to 30 per cent fat. Imagine how hard it is to lose weight if you keep eating too many foods like this. And imagine what they do to your skin—making it greasy and prone to blackheads as a result of clogged pores. Too much saturated fat also affects your blood circulation, and this is bad news