The Seven-Day Soup Diet is the latest in a long line of quick weight loss plans that promise to take off the pounds while allowing dieters to eat all they want, as long as all they want is soup. Like the cabbage soup diet and the new cabbage soup diet before it, the Seven-Day Soup Diet requires dieters to fill up on low-calorie vegetable soup, allowing some servings of bananas and meat for potassium and protein several days of the week.
None of these short-term eating plans is a magical fat-burning soup diet. Any successful soup diet takes off the pounds through calorie deprivation.
How every diet takes off the first three to four pounds
The first three or four pounds of weight loss on a soup diet are achieved by depleting the liver's stores of an energy source called glycogen. To make glycogen, the liver combines one molecule of sugar with four molecules of water. Making glycogen stores water weight. The process of converting the glycogen to glucose fuel releases the water as soon as the body is just 1,000 to 1,500 calories short of its daily needs. Using glycogen for energy releases water weight. This water weight comes right back as soon as the dieter eats 1,000 to 1,500 calories more than the body requires.
How to use a soup diet to take off pounds for good
The Seven-Day Soup Diet works only as long as dieters stick to the plan, and it only takes a day for the weight lost to come back, but there is a way to use soup for long-term, sustainable weight loss. Soups that are simmered a long time (at least two hours) create unique particles of food chemically combining their ingredients in ways that take a long time to digest. As long as these particles linger in your stomach, the whole contents of the soup, water included, will stay in your stomach along with them.
Nutritionist Barbara J. Rolls of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and Penn State University has conducted over 250 clinical trials of soup and other moist foods in regulating appetite and food consumption. She has found that beginning any meal with a bowl of soup (and it doesn't have to be a big bowl, as little as one cup of slow-simmered home-made soup is enough) allows eaters to feel satisfied eating 100 to 250 calories less during the rest of the meal. Starting meals with soup may only enable weight loss of 1/2 pound to 1 pound a week, but the weight will continue to come off painlessly, although slowly.
Use soup as a snack
Feel hungry later? Instead of reaching for pretzels or walking down to the candy machine, have another bowl of soup. It takes a little planning, but you can make soup in a big batch up to a week ahead.
Soup is a sensible choice for long-term, slow, but sustainable weight loss. When the objective is losing weight over a year rather than over a week, it's possible to take off pounds painlessly and for good.
Sources:
- Flood JE, Rolls BJ. Soup preloads in a variety of forms reduce meal energy intake. Appetite. 2007 Nov;49(3):626-34. Epub 2007 Apr 14.
- Rolls BJ, Bell EA, Thorwart ML. Water incorporated into a food but not served with a food decreases energy intake in lean women. Am J Clin Nutr. 1999 Oct;70(4):448-55.
