The cabbage soup diet - its a bit of a fad diet

The Cabbage Soup Diet is a short term fast lose diet. It lasts for seven days and has been suggested as a starter diet or a short term fix diet.  Most diets aim at losing 1 or 2 lbs a week but the cabbage diet is meant to kick start the process and aims to make you lose about 10 lbs in 7 days.

The obvious attraction is fast weight loss in a short time but there are rules.  Apart from the obvious - seek medical advice before starting a diet, you need to drink plenty of water (at least eight glasses per day), take mutivitamins, and stick to the diet rigidly.

There are lots of tips about the diet but one of the key things appears to be to make a good base cabbage soup, without too much cabbage, as that appears to be the most palpable option.  It can be spiced up to help the taste.

Basically, it is a low fat, high Fibre diet, which with spices can help kick start weight loss. The soup consists of Cabbage, mushrooms,peppers, tinned tomatoes,carrots,green peppers, onions,Lipton soup mix, Bullion cubes,can of V8 juice along with seasoning.

During the week you eat different foods on different days but always as much cabbage soup as you need. One day is for bananas, another day you don’t eat any banana. It appears to be based on the cabbage soup with different foods on different days to cause different effects on your metabolism. 

The general feeling seems to be that you need to drink plenty of water, take multi vitamins, and have headache tablets to hand as headaches are a regular side effect.  The diet itself cannot be followed for longer that seven days as it is very low in calories and not everyone is full of energy, in fact some people feel quite weak. It is generally regarded as a “fad” diet and not generally recommended as a healthy option for losing weight.