The Big Healthy Soup Diet: Nourish Your Body and Lose up to 10lbs in a Week. Linda Lazarides
right foods all this water can be urinated away within a week!
The Waterfall Diet provides foods that help address these causes, and omits foods that could potentially contribute to water retention. Many of the soup recipes in this book are suitable for the Waterfall Diet (see the Index on page 131). If you want to see whether you need the Waterfall Diet, try consuming just these soups and nothing else for 10 days. If you spend a lot of time urinating and your clothes quickly begin to hang loose, then you definitely need to read more about the Waterfall Diet (see Resources, page 277) so that you can combat this problem on a more long-term basis.
If you have two or more of the following signs you may be suffering from water retention:
You have worked hard to lose weight using conventional methods, and found that you cannot get below a certain weight even by persevering for months or years
Pressing a fingernail firmly into your thumb-pad leaves a deep dent that won’t go away after a second or two
Pressing the tip of your finger into the inside of your shin-bone leaves a dent
Swelling of legs, feet or ankles
Your shoe size seems to increase as you get older
Rings sometimes seem not to fit any more
You seem to have a major swelling problem in hot weather
Your tummy is often tight and swollen
Breast tenderness (in women)
Premenstrual weight gain (in women)
Your weight fluctuates by several pounds within the space of only 24 hours
FOOD ADDICTIONS
If you have a lot of weight to lose, the good news is that the Big Healthy Soup Diet is ideal to help you. But of course there is more to weight-loss than just eating the right diet. Exercise (see page 17) is equally important. And, due to the well-known problem of food
ADVICE TO COMBAT FOOD ADDICTIONS
Don’t miss meals. Missed meals lead to much greater cravings for addictive foods. Eat extra portions of soup for the first two weeks while you are going through sugar withdrawal.
Whatever happens, never, ever keep your favourite addictive foods (such as chocolate) in the home, not even for your children.
Have a treat every day. It should be something you like but are not normally addicted to. For instance, if you used to eat chocolate bars every day, replace them with home-made hot chocolate drinks. The ‘comfort factor’ won’t be anything like 100 per cent at first, but after about two weeks it will reach the 80-90 per cent level. Commercial hot chocolate mixes are very high in sugar, so make your own by whisking cocoa powder and a little raw sugar into hot low-fat dairy milk or rice milk. Add a dash of vanilla for extra flavour. Every time you find yourself craving chocolate, take your mind off it by going to make yourself one of these drinks. Or eat a bowl of soup!
If you have consumed a lot of sugary foods and drinks in the recent past, you should take a good quality daily multivitamin with minerals (including chromium). This will help restore and rebalance your system and give your hormones the best chance of maintaining your blood sugar on an even keel, which will help control physical craving sensations.
addiction, not everyone finds it possible to cut down or stop eating comfort foods straight away, even if they follow a diet that leaves them never feeling hungry.
Food addictions can be as difficult to overcome as addictions to alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Chemical changes—perhaps the release of endorphins—occur in your body on eating the addictive food. These changes are experienced as pleasurable and comforting sensations, and the addiction comes from associating the food with these sensations. You can even begin to feel mildly depressed when the pleasant sensations wear off, and this can cause insatiable cravings that keep you eating the problem food, just as nicotine withdrawal symptoms—no matter how mild—keep people smoking.
Since most addictive foods are high in sugar, the depression may be due to the strong dip in blood sugar that occurs in some people a few hours after eating sugary foods. Eating or drinking something sweet provides an instant boost, but it starts the vicious circle all over again. A deficiency of the mineral chromium substantially aggravates blood sugar problems. Chromium is mostly found in whole-grain foods and gets very depleted when you consume a lot of sugary foods and drinks.
EXERCISE
The more accustomed your body gets to hard exercise, the faster your cells will use up and burn calories. But your cells do not just step up their metabolism during the period of exercise itself. Your metabolic rate remains high for up to 15 hours afterwards—so your calories will be burned up faster even while you are asleep.
To help you lose weight, exercise must be regular, and hard enough to make you sweat or breathe faster for at least 20 minutes, about three times a week. Examples are weight or circuit training, hill-walking, jogging, swimming and aerobics. You should also walk briskly or cycle whenever you can, use stairs instead of lifts and elevators, walk up escalators, do the housework twice as fast, and go dancing instead of sitting in pubs and bars. Try to park your car a few minutes’ walk from where you’re going. All these things make a difference.
Experts in physiology have known for years that a body with more lean tissue (also known as muscle) makes for a more rapid metabolic rate. But both men and women start to lose muscle in their 20s, which is why, by middle age, it can be so hard to lose weight. Muscle can only be regained by exercising. In a study carried out by Tufts University, eight men and four women aged 56 to 80 carried out strength-building exercises for 30 minutes three times a week for 12 weeks. This boosted their resting metabolic rate by an amazing eight per cent, and they had to consume an extra 300 calories a day to keep their body weight at the same level. Their muscles did not grow any larger on this programme, but they did become stronger and more metabolically active.
Strength-building exercises involve sustaining a muscle’s effort—holding the muscle in its position of maximum tension for as long as possible. Weight-lifting is the best-known but not the only form of strength-building exercise. The body’s weight itself can be used to sustain maximum muscular effort—for instance in sit-up exercises which involve remaining in the stomach muscles’ position of maximum effort for a count of 10.
Most people live within reasonable distance of a local health club with a gym. An instructor is always available to give a supervised training programme to meet personal requirements, and teach clients how to follow it.
Women please note that a few hours’ strength-building a week is very unlikely to result in hard muscles! On the contrary, improving the lean-to-fat ratio gives a woman a great shape and makes her feel lighter and more energetic for the simple reason that her muscles will find it easier to carry her around.
Strength-building exercises are best combined with exercises designed to build cardiovascular fitness. You can tell roughly what your level of cardiovascular fitness is by how easily you get out of breath. Cycling, swimming, running, aerobics and rowing are all suitable forms, and it is surprising how quickly your fitness improves if you practise any of these a few times a week, even if only for 20 minutes.
If you find it hard to motivate yourself to exercise alone, try finding an exercise partner who agrees to meet up with you on a regular basis.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BREAKFAST
Some people try to lose weight by skipping breakfast, but this isn’t a good idea. Breakfast stimulates your metabolism to wake up after an overnight fast. The speed of your metabolism determines how quickly you burn calories, so if you don’t eat breakfast, your metabolism may remain at its night-time rate—slow!