The Cabbage Soup Diet

Fad diets have become part of a billion dollar industry encouraging men and women of all ages that you really can lose 20 pounds in 2 weeks. But what is a fad diet? Just as the name states, it's only a fad, while it might help you lose weight, that weight loss is only temporary because much of what you lose is water weight from your muscles, yet once you finish the diet and go back to normal eating you have less muscle tissue but the same amount of fat. These diets use the idea of eliminating specific foods seen as harmful, and an emphasis is put one specific food group. Many people believe that by doing this, as a direct result, they will lose drastic amounts of weight within a short period of time. In turn people across the country will spend any amount of money for that quick and easy fix.

The first diet I am going to talk about is called the Cabbage Soup diet, which consists of eating a low-calorie cabbage soup periodically throughout the day for one week, along with other specific foods laid out in a day to day meal plan. The diet claims you will lose 10 pounds in seven days as a result. At first look this diet already seems too good to be true, but to really analyze it, look at the ingredients in the cabbage soup. It contains; 1 green pepper, 1 large can of diced tomatoes, 6 stalks of celery, 1 large onion, 1-2 cubes of Bouillon, 1 head of cabbage, 48 oz. of V-8 Juice, and 4 cups of water. By looking at the ingredients in the soup I can already tell how someone could lose so much weight, the amount of fiber in this diet is over the top. Fiber is a nutrient found in fruits and vegetables that flushes the toxins out of your body when you go to the bathroom. By doing so you are losing a significant amount of weight. This diet also contains a large amount of salt, from the V-8 juice, and the cubes of Bouillon, which is a dehydrated broth with a high salt content. As you know when you eat salt, you drink more, the more you drink, the more you go to the bathroom, therefore making you lose weight. Though this diet seems like a good way to lose weight, it sure seems like a lot of time in the bathroom! Another alarming aspect to this diet is the day to day diet plan. For example day 4 says to eat as many as eight bananas, that seems like a lot of bananas for one day! Also, day 5 says to eat 10-20 ounces of beef and up to 6 fresh tomatoes, that is 4 quarter pounders, who could possible eat all that? All in all, the Cabbage Soup diet might be good for a temporary weight drop, yet it is not a healthy or realistic diet for long term weight loss.

You might be wondering, what you should look for in a good diet. Balance, variety and moderation are the key ingredients to success when choosing a diet that is right for you. You want a balance of different foods from each food group, a variety of different kinds of food in each group, and to avoid over consuming one food from any specific group. As you can see the Cabbage Soup Diet is not very balanced in that you are eating food from mainly 2 food groups, there is no variety because you are mainly eating vegetables and meat, and moderation is not a key word in this diet as we can see from the 8 bananas and 20 ounces of beef. By seeing this diet does not pass these 3 requirements we can this is not a very efficient or healthy diet.