CABBAGE SOUP DIET

Has anyone ever tried this 'cabbage soup diet' apparantly it goes like this:

Day One:
Fruit: Eat all of the fruit you want (except bananas). Eat only your soup and the fruit for the first day. For drinks- unsweetened teas, cranberry juice and water.

Day Two:
Vegetables: Eat until you are stuffed will all fresh, raw or cooked vegetables of your choice. Try to eat leafy green vegetables and stay away from dry beans, peas and corn. Eat all the vegetables you want along with your soup. At dinner, reward yourself with a big baked potato with butter. Do not eat fruit today.

Day Three:
Mix Days One and Two: Eat all the soup, fruits and vegetables you want. No Baked Potato.

Day Four:
Bananas and Skim Milk: Eat as many as eight bananas and drink as many glasses of skim milk as you would like on this day, along with your soup. This day is supposed to lessen your desire for sweets.

Day Five:
Beef And Tomatos: Ten to twenty ounces of beef and up to six fresh tomtoes. Drink at least 6 to 8 glasses of water this day to wash the uric acid from your body. Eat your soup at least once this day. You may eat broiled or baked chicken instead of beef (but absolutely no skin-on chicken). If you prefer, you can substitute broiled fish for the beef one one of the beef days (but not both).

Day Six:
Beef and Vegetables: Eat to your heart's content of beef and vegetables this day. You can even have 2 or 3 steaks if you like, with leafy green vegetables. No Baked Potato. Eat your soup at least once.

Day Seven:
Brown rice, unsweetened fruit juices and vegetables: Again stuff, stuff, stuff yourself. Be sure to eat your soup at least once this day.

 

If anyone has tried it, and it has worked for you, let me know... I'm about to try it out - but I'm a bit confused.  I have pretty rigid diet right now: I eat plenty of cabbage, tuna, other veggies during the week.  Some fruit as snacks... not too much carbs really.  So this diet is probably more than what I'm eating right now.  Im consuming anywhere from 800-1200 a day.  Which I'm sure most will say its not good since I work out two times a day. But I need to loose weight quicky - and I'm running out of time.  I currently sit at 160 lbs., my ideal weight is 125.  I'm overweight right now and want to get my bmi down.  So far this has worked for me.  I used to weigh 189.  Ive lost around 25 pounds from july to september.  Any other useful advice.

Thanks in advance!

hey...it sounds....bland. But if you want motivation to lose 5-10 lbs over the next month, I am also 160 (5'8") and am looking to lose as well. We could try eating less and being healthy and use this diet as a guideline and keep one another motivated and focused? Sound good?

Well, some people have had success on it and others find it too constricting. I kinda go with the later. I question the logic on day four (bananas and milk) on that day lessening your desire for sweets as both bananas and milk are high in sugars, fructose and lactose. Seems to me, that that menu would set you up for serious cravings! but that is just my opinion.

Good luck and keep us posted on how this method works for you.

Joyce

Yes, I tried that about 25 years ago when I didn't realize it was a starvation diet.

PS You're close to a starvation diet yourself. 800 calories is not enough to keep yourself healthy. You're losing all your muscle and probably destroying your organs. Take care of yourself.

The cabbage soup diet is at its core a calorie-restricted diet.  The cabbage soup that you eat high volumes of to fill up, is negligible in calories.   I never understood the bananas day either.  Who on earth could eat eight bananas in one day and not suffer serious gastrointestinal consequences?? 

Sounds like you're already being too restrictive with your eating.  You'd do better to add a few hundred calories per day to your diet in the form of some nutrition-dense foods; fruits and veggies are always a good choice! 

I also tried it about 20 years ago (the air force and I were having the yearly battle over my weight) -- first it drove me crazy, OMG, so deadly boring, and for someone with no portion control -- I ate a lot; second, as soon as I went back to eating normally -- not junk, just normal foods -- I pounded the weight back on.  (I was exercising daily as well as riding my bike back and forth to work).

I don't recommend it.  You may not be losing weight right now because you may not be eating enough as it is.

The people I have seen do this diet were looking for a quick fix. They would lose like 10 lbs. the first week, but then couldn't lose anymore weight afterwards. They also gained the weight back as soon as they began eating normally.

motivation is always great hgeldhauser... i appreciate it.  Im not sure if I'm going to start this anytime soon... I'm mentally preparing myself for the banana day.. haha imagine that? 8 bananas? i am tho very focused on my acutal diet and daily workouts.  so im down for motivating eachother!

"But I need to loose weight quicky - and I'm running out of time."

I doubt you NEED to lose weight quickly. You might WANT to, but NEED to? And running out of time? That, I also doubt.

You didn't gain the extra weight overnight, and you can't take it off safely overnight, either. The cabbage "diet" doesn't work, unless you want to put any weight you want to lose right back on.

Eat enough but not too much to fuel your body machine, exercise it to keep it toned, and the weight will come off safely.

OMG this must be the oldest trend/ fad diet ever. 

I think they put the cabbage in it so the pieces would distinguish it from drinking plain warm water :D.

If you are looking for a jumpstart, I suggest the 2week phase 1 of southbeach.  You will get to pick from a lot of unprocessed foods w/o carbs but we it most on the SB thread who join and start this have some strong weight loss and it is healthy. 

I cant hear brown rice without thinking of this diet dinosaur.

I tried this a few years ago to drop quick pounds before a wedding I had to go to.  I was extremely ill and tired by day 4.  When the wedding came around a few days later, I still looked off color.

Yes it has been around for a long, long time.  I tried it back in the 1970s, felt sick after the 4th day and couldn't stand the smell of cabbage for a year. 

And I gained back the 5 pounds I lost, plus 5 more.

No thanks!

As far as diets go...anything that advertises "eat as much of X food as you want" is wrong.

Weightloss isnt about eating one type of food (and normally, that type of food is just going to be a super low calorie item, better to just learn to control your hunger ...). Its about learning portion control and paying attention to calories to fit with your lifestyle.... thats all.... thats everything there is to know about dieting.

If you learn and do those basic things, you WILL get into better condition. No need to do something like "only lemonaid!" or "eat as much soup as you want!"..... because those are just lies (but they sound so simple so people buy into it).

Ugh. I tried this diet once. The taste and smell of the cabbage soup was so gross.

I think I made the soup, tasted it, tried to eat it once or twice and basically threw it all away.

You can do more interesting things with cabbage anyhow (while still keeping low calorie). Like, cook it with tomato puree and some skim milk with indian spices! mmm

Ive tried this diet several times and never once made it past day 3. I just couldnt eat nothing but bananas. My mother did this diet and lost a lot of weight...and her hair.

(oh god.. that's awful kerry07!)

jigwa, please don't do this to your body!!  You're literally made of what you eat - do you want to be made of cabbage?  haha.. Seriously, you need healthy amounts of carbs, fat, and protein, dozens of complex nutrients and fibre.  This diet makes about as much sense as an all-marshmallow diet (no fat! :D) or an all-quince diet. it's basically a fast, and all fasts do is trigger starvation responses in your body, meaning you'll store even more fat when you're done. Forget the fads.  Learn some nutritional common sense!! 

Spirochete is right!  The time to build a lean, strong body is now..

Take it easy, jigwa -- You're moving dangerously quickly already!! You've lost 25 pounds in 2 months??  Holey Canolli, that's a lot -- 3 pounds a week?  Sooo.. you're taking in 800-1200, (most certainly below your BMR), AND burning another, what, 600 cal's?  That leaves about 200 - 600 cal's for your body build and repair your bones and muscles.  You're not leaving it much to work with...  I'm worried about you compormising your muscle mass, and that will definitely lower your metabolism even further.  More muscle =  more calorie burning.  Don't break it down, build it up! 

What's the big hurry?

Good luck!  Take care of youself!!

:oD

Tara

*(note -- if you want to jump-start your metabolism, try intervals, though to have enough fuel to do intervals, you need to eat more than 800 cal's per day)

Funny about the hair!  Turns out you can use friends to, according to this summary from Wikipedia:

.... On a practical level, the most common forms of the soup recipe have been criticized as being bland, though spicy variations have appeared. Even so, the blandness of the soup means that few manage the entire seven days, and often report feeling nauseous whenever they smell the soup toward the end of the week-long diet. It has also been noted that farting is a common side effect of the diet.

It worked for me years back, but again...it's a fad diet. No different than fasting (juice & cayanne diet) you will shed some weight but you're more than likely to put it on faster and add more afterwards. Look at Beyonce, perfect example. For the movie Dream Girls she admitted to doing the juice/cayanne diet for 2 weeks...she dropped nearly 25 pounds!!!...Sure, it got her movie-ready, but she's since added more weight than where she started.