Soup diet is quite an interesting diet plan for people who want to get rid of unwanted kilograms at an express pace – even 9 kg in a week. Such a diet gives you the freedom of eating, so you eat to your heart’s content and you don’t starve. However, a significant limitation in this case is the type of dishes you can eat, because the entire diet menu in this case is based on eating vegetable soups 7 days a week, which can also be enriched with meat, fish or lean dairy.

Why do slimming diets require a lot of perseverance? Most people give up because of too many dietary sacrifices, which are hard for an overweight or obese person to cope with. However, a soup diet is quite different because it has no set calorie threshold or meal size for the day. It also does not reduce the menu to 2-3 products, and in addition, they are easy to prepare and cheap. Therefore, this diet is quite a good solution for those people who struggle with quite a frequent feeling of hunger, and in addition this type of diet allows us to replace each meal without harming our health. If we follow a soup diet, we can eat up to 4-5 meals a day, which will be light and perfectly hydrate and warm us up. The main ingredient of this diet is vegetable broth, but if we add some carbohydrates, lean meat, fish and season it with herbs and lean dairy during cooking, the final result is a complete, balanced meal. Thanks to this you can reach for a delicious, filling soup every time you have an appetite. Moreover, we can do without remorse or counting calories. Also our skin will benefit from it, which will look younger. This is thanks to the high content of vegetables, which provide us with adequate amounts of dietary fiber.

What is a soup diet? The menu in such a diet plan is based on soups using various vegetables, including: beets, cabbage, tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, pumpkin, green beans, mushrooms, spinach, carrots, celery, cucumbers, potatoes, etc. We have a lot of them to choose from, so we can create a variety of combinations, because everything depends on our creativity, which will prevent us from falling into culinary monotony. The soup diet menu usually presents traditional soups and cream soups.

The soup diet has two variants. The first one consists in eating only soups. With this model of nutrition, you will quickly lose weight. This is due to the calorific value of soups, because one portion of soup is about 250 grams, or 150 kcal, so eating even 6 meals a day consisting only of soups will provide our body with only 900 kcal! The second variant of the diet is to replace two meals a day with soup. It is also important to add to the soup such ingredients as onions, chives, turnips or celery. They are primarily responsible for turning up the flavor, but also increase the content of vitamin C and dietary fiber in the meal. One should remember, however, about the need to supplement proteins, therefore it is worth to drink one cup of lean natural yoghurt, milk, kefir, buttermilk or vegetable cocktail with chlorella or spirulina a day. The discussed diet can also be treated as a one-day detox of our body. It consists in cooking a soup and dividing it into portions that will be intended for the whole day. It is also worth remembering about protein, it is not an essential ingredient needed for the proper functioning of the body, so it is worth cooking soup with a meat insert, while in the case of people who are on a vegetarian diet, it is important to take care of such ingredients in the meal as:

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While on a soup diet, it is worth following a few key rules that will help us prepare a meal so that it supports weight loss, the digestive process and removes toxins from the body and unnecessary metabolic products. They are as follows:

The soup diet that most of us have certainly heard of is a diet based on cabbage soup, but there is no clearly defined ideal soup that will enable us to lose weight. The simplest definition of such a day is to prepare a soup that contains vegetables, lean meat and low fat in its recipe. The most popular soup diets include:

Before starting any diet we should consult it with our GP even if we do not have any health problems. When choosing a diet method, we should not suggest a “fad” diet. Some diet programs are composed in such a way that their proposals have dishes that are poor in some nutrients or have a significant caloric deficit which, as a result, may cause deterioration of our health.

In case of soup diet contraindications concern pregnant women and people with thyroid diseases or food intolerances. In addition, it should not be used by diabetics, children and adolescents, as well as seniors.

On the other hand, if we do not have any health contraindications, soup diet is ideal for people who suffer from a sore throat, have difficulty swallowing or dental problems – are after surgery, wearing braces or have aphthous ulcers. In addition, it is popular with people who have just undergone food poisoning.

The soup diet came to us from abroad, from Brazil to be exact, in Poland its precursor is Monika Honory. She developed a model of how to follow this diet, which allows us to lose unnecessary kilograms – even up to 5 kg per month. The diet plan is divided into three stages:

All dishes in the soup diet contain primarily vegetables, which are rich in valuable dietary fiber, so they allow you to quite well satisfy the feeling of hunger for a long time.

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Following a soup diet, you will notice that your metabolism will accelerate and your body will gradually cleanse itself. Subcutaneous water will also be eliminated, and digestive processes will be significantly regulated. This is due to the fact that vegetable soups provide very few calories, even when eaten frequently and in relatively large portions, so the body will draw energy from stored reserves in the form of fat tissue.

The result of a soup diet will be an effective improvement of metabolism and intensification of fat burning, which leads to a loss of 3-8 kg in a week. It is good to remember that the first phase of this diet should not last longer than 5-7 days. Then there is an increased risk of yoyo effect, as well as leading to deficiencies of essential nutrients in our body.

A soup diet makes it possible for us to get the figure we dream of, but this diet plan also has its drawbacks. First of all, our body needs solid food, because during chewing the production of digestive enzymes begins, and an impulse reaches the brain, which is responsible for activating further digestive processes in our body. Unfortunately, a soup diet deprives us of this possibility. Additionally, biting and throwing food has a very good effect on the state of teeth and occlusion.

This diet is also low in calories, that is why during its implementation we may feel weakness, fatigue and hunger. If we follow the diet for a longer period of time, we may also encounter the opposite effect, namely the slowing down of our metabolism, and this makes it more difficult to lose the excess weight. The diet plan is also poor in terms of nutritional values, and thus does not provide the appropriate amount of nutrients.

The developed nutrition model also does not give us a 100% guarantee of long-term maintenance of the target body weight. Low calorie diets cause rapid weight loss, but if we return to normal eating we can very quickly make up for the lost kilograms.

The soup diet has a wide range of opinions, but the majority of them are positive. This is a diet that provides very few calories, so it is easy to get rid of unsightly folds and excess weight. This is not a diet plan that is recommended for all people. If you are not a fan of eating vegetables and vegetable soups, you may feel a bit bored with eating only this kind of food for a week, which will be a real test of endurance for you. However, if you love all types of vegetables, it should not be a problem to persevere on such a diet.

The effectiveness of the soup diet is due to the high water content of the meal, so that you get full when eating smaller portions without consuming solid foods and feeling satiated. High water content in the meal is the basis of the volumetric diet, on which many scientific studies have been conducted. Studies have shown that starting a dinner with soup – in this trial a broth with rice was used – leads to 26% less calories being consumed from the second course. Additionally, it has been proven that eating soup and the second course resulted in 20% fewer calories consumed during the entire meal. In this case, the study was conducted while eating a broth with a side of potatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots and butter. The condition was to eat a portion that should provide a maximum of 100 to 150 kcal.

A very important fact is water, which should be a component of meals. It has been proven that drinking a glass of water after eating a meal will not work as well as eating a soup that contains the same amount of liquid. This is due to the fact that the water bound by the ingredients from the food slows down the emptying of the stomach, so that we feel satiety for a longer time. This is related to the effectiveness of the soup diet.

Preparation: soak the mushrooms in a small amount of boiling water, then pour the water into the bouillon together with the chopped mushrooms. Boil the bouillon, throw in the chopped vegetables including the beans and cook for 40 minutes. Then add the tomatoes and continue cooking. At the end add olive oil and season the soup to taste.

Pepper and tomato soup

Preparation: the broth should be boiled. Then throw the chopped vegetables including the garlic into the pot. Boil it for 15 to 20 minutes. The soup can be blended. Season to taste.

Zucchini soup with garlic

Preparation: chop the onion, which you fry for about 3-5 minutes. Then add the diced courgettes and simmer for 5-7 minutes. Add the vegetable stock and leave to simmer, covered, for around 15 minutes. Season to taste. The soup can be blended.

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