Why you should’nt try the cabbage soup diet

Hello my name is William Messruther and I am a dieting consultant. I have been specialising in this field for around 6 years now and I focus my studies on fad diets, wether they work and the effects they can have on your body. For the next few weeks I will be writing articles for as many different fad diets as I can find myself. Here is my next installment, talking about the Cabbage Soup Diet.

The Cabbage Soup Diet , also known as The Sacred Heart Diet, Military Cabbage Soup Diet, TJ Miracle Soup Diet and the Russian Peasant Diet is basically a heavy consumption of low-calorie cabbage soup over a period of 7 days and has the intentions of losing you 10lbs in that time, from my point of view, this amount of weight loss in this short period of time is nearly impossible and unhealthy, and the lost weight will mostly be of water. The 'pros' of this diet are said to be fast weight loss, you can eat as much food as you want, that's listed, and it provides a good kick start to other diets.

Typically, the diet consists of eating cabbage soup every day, complemented by some fruit, veg or beef, and drinks are limited to water except where stated otherwise. They say there are 6 key factors that make this diet successful and they are to follow the diet religiously, drink at least 4 glasses of water per day, remember that its only for 7 days, use multivitamin tablets to compliment, eat as much soup as you can and don't go hungry, try spices to liven it up and break the monotony. A typical diet looks like this;

Day 1 - Cabbage soup, as much fruit as you like, excluding bananas

Day 2 - Cabbage soup, vegetables including 1 baked potato with a little butter

Day 3 - Cabbage soup, fruit and veg excluding potatoes and bananas

Day 4 - Cabbage soup, up to 8 bananas and as much skimmed milk as you want

Day 5 - Cabbage soup, up to 20 ounces of beef and up to six tomatoes

Day 6 - Cabbage soup, as much beef and veg (excluding potatoes) as you want

Day 7 - Cabbage soup, brown rice, veg (excluding potatoes) and unsweetened fruit juice

I will now give you my verdict on the cabbage soup diet and explain why I think you should not try it. First of all this is purely a short-term weight loss offering and unsuitable for a long term diet. This being because it is low calorie, low fat and very high fiber. You will go through several days at a time taking extremely high sodium and pretty much zero protein. This is unhealthy. You will feel nauseous, weak and have decreased concentration levels. Another common side effect is extremely bad wind! So you may want to keep those windows open at home and in the office! I do not recommend this diet to anybody.

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