What is it?

The cabbage soup diet is a popular fad diet where you eat mainly cabbage soup for 7 days with the promise of losing 10lbs of weight in that time.

Nobody knows who first thought up this diet, there does not seem to be any one person or organisation that claim ownership of it. Yet it remains incredibly popular as it appears to be a simple diet which promises quick and easy weight loss just by eating soup whenever you feel hungry.

It is a low calorie, low carb, low fat and low protein diet, all mixed up into one!

The typical 7 day plan for the diet looks like this:

Day 1 – Eat just the soup plus as much fruit as you like (we recommend a fruit salad for breakfast which goes down better than the soup!)

Day 2 – Eat the soup plus as many veggies as you want all day, at dinner have a jacket potato with a little butter

Day 3 – Eat the soup plus as much fruit or veg as you want, avoid bananas and potatoes though

Day 4 – Eat the soup plus have skimmed milk if you want and anything up to 8 bananas

Day 5 – Eat the soup plus you are allowed up to 20 ounces of beef (steak anyone??) and 6 tomatoes

Day 6 – Eat the soup plus as much beef and veg as you want (no potatoes though)

Day 7 – Eat the soup plus as much brown rice, vegetables and unsweetened fruit juice as you want

Now let’s discuss whether it is any good.

Is it any good?

This is a fad diet because it gets you to try and eat just one kind of food all the time and promises you a huge amount of weight loss after just 7 days, but as far as fad diets go then it does have some good points.

The soup (although it is actually more of a stew as you can see in the section below) is packed full of healthy vegetables, cabbage has lots of nutrients as do all of the other ingredients, which is great. This means the diet gets you to eat more fruit and vegetables while cutting out the sugary foods and snacks that you usually eat – definitely a good thing!

The problem lies with the fact it is not nutritionally balanced, there is hardly any fat or protein in the diet aside from the small amounts in the vegetables of the soup. We need small amounts of fat and a larger amount of protein every day to keep ourselves healthy, so they should not be cut out of your diet. Taking some fish oil supplements and adding in some beef to the soup should help to round things out.

Plus losing 10lbs of fat in a week is just not realistic, oh sure 10lbs of weight is possible, but from all the diets I’ve read (a lot) and all the research I’ve seen, then losing over 2lbs of fat a week is extremely hard to do, the rest of the weight in most claims comes from water and muscle loss. You don’t want to lose muscle if you can help it and water loss is temporary so when you start to eat normally again then suddenly you put back on a lot of the weight you lost.

That makes the primary reason for people wanting to do the diet, the huge weightloss claims it makes, null and void as it is more muscle and water loss than fat loss and a lot of the weight will come back. Combine that with 40 minutes of work to make the soup and over 2 hours more in cooking just to get 6 bowls worth (that is what it took for our batch) then you can see this is a time consuming diet to follow if the rewards are not going to be worth it.

I’ve already eaten 3 bowls today and I am sitting here writing while still hungry, I will go and get some fruit in a minute as I want to try and keep it to 4 bowls of the soup a day, otherwise I will need to create a new batch almost every day and that is too much work!

I’d recommend fruit salad for breakfast by the way, or raw vegetables if you can on the veggie days, having an oniony-cabbagey vegetable stew for breakfast is not the best way to start the day…

The soup tastes good though, but you do get bored of it after the first day, and it does give you wind and contains lots of onion and cabbage so don’t take lots of this to work and expect people to stick around you for long!

Then there is the fact the diet teaches you nothing about healthy eating in the long term so when you come off the diet then you will go straight back to your old ways and the weight will come back, only this time slightly more will be fat as you lost some muscle on the diet so if you weigh the same as before then fat took the place of the lost muscle.

Some people love the diet and swear by it, others hate it and quickly get bored or see the weight come rushing back afterwards, if you really want to try it then get it out of your system and you’ll find the details below, but if you are looking for a much easier diet then check out my Eat Stop Eat review, or if you are looking for a diet which also teaches you how to eat healthily long term then check out my Fat Loss Bible review.

Now I’m off for some fruit or another bowl of soup…!

How do you make it?

There are loads of different recipes online all claiming to be the cabbage soup diet recipe, about the only ingredients they all agree on are:

- Cabbage
- Green Peppers
- Celery
- Chopped tomatoes
- Onions

Then there are other things like mushrooms which people add in and onion soup mix etc, but the above is the base recipe which you can begin with. So for my batch I used:

- 2/3 cabbage
- 2 Green peppers
- 4 Sticks of celery
- 200g of mushrooms
- 750ml chopped tomatoes
- 2 large onions

This gave enough for 6 bowlfuls (all filled up like the picture below) and the result was this:

I don’t know where those pictures of some pea green, totally smooth soup come from on sites that talk about this diet! Of course you could use a blender and add in some more water to make it into more of a soup rather than a stew, and you might water it down to 7 or 8 bowls worth then as well, but that green colour is wishful thinking…

Now I am no chef and again the cooking instructions vary drastically from site to site, but here is what I did:

• Cut up the onions and gently sauté in a frying pan with some oil for a few minutes to take the edge off them.
• While they are cooking then chop up your cabbage into small pieces and get that into your pan with some boiling water (just to the top of the cabbage) and boil it while you do the rest of the veg, this helps reduce it so you can fit everything in, if your pan is big enough then ignore that step and just put everything in together.
• Now cut everything else up into small pieces to suit your taste and mix it all up together.
• Drain half the water from the cabbage to give you some room to add everything in.
• Add the onions into the cabbage and mix it all up, then add in the chopped tomatoes and mix it all up, then slowly add in the other chopped veg while stirring so it all mixes up together.
• Now add in some more boiling water until it is about an inch from the top of the pan.
• Boil for 10 minutes then put a lid on it and allow to simmer for about 2 hours until all the veg goes soft.

Voila! You might want to add some beef in like I suggested earlier, I just cooked mine separately as I had no more room in the pan and then added it in cold to a bowl of soup when I was ready for it.

I purposely left out any flavourings because I feel it is much better to add these in later to your individual bowl of soup, that stops you ruining a whole batch if things went wrong, and also allows you to subtly alter the taste of each bowl to help give you some variety.