The Big Healthy Soup Diet: Nourish Your Body and Lose up to 10lbs in a Week

INTRODUCTION:

HEALTH IN A BOWL—LOOK AND FEEL GOOD WITH SOUP!

Whether you’re trying to lose weight or just to get more healthy, soup is the ultimate convenience food: easy to make, filling and low in calories. Soup is never boring. It can be thick or thin, smooth or chunky, or a combination of the two. Healthy ingredients and power foods can be combined easily and deliciously to maximize weight-loss or combat ailments. If you want to lose weight, soup can help to release hidden water retention, control appetite, stimulate metabolism and promote fat-loss. You can add ingredients to promote the good health of arteries, bones, skin and hormones; or others to reduce blood pressure and cholesterol and fight the causes of arthritis. What more could you ask for from a meal? Is there no limit to what soup can do?

So how does it work? The Big Healthy Soup Diet is the ultimate food-combining system. It’s all about putting in the right ingredients and power foods for what you want to achieve, and then waiting for the results. If you want to lose weight there’s no need to choose between low-carb, low-calorie, detox, food-combining, glycaemic index, water-release or cabbage soup diets when you can have them all rolled into one. As a nutritionist, I find that soup gets you to your target weight faster and more easily than anything else The ancient food-combining wisdom of Oriental and Ayurvedic medicine can also be applied to soup—it is so incredibly versatile. The recipes are all here for you. With the Big Healthy Soup Diet you will learn how to lose not just excess body fat, but also hidden water retention, a common cause of excess weight that cannot be shifted with normal diets. The result is maximum weight-loss for minimum effort!

Many of the soups in this book make satisfying one-pot meals. Best of all, you can return for second helpings as you won’t be piling on the calories. The warmth and liquid of soup fill you up quickly, and the recipes make extensive use of ingredients rich in soluble fibre. This means you get minimal calories while slowing down carbohydrate absorption, helping to prevent surges in the hormones that stimulate appetite.

If you are currently following a diet and don’t feel ready just yet to make a change, don’t worry—the Big Healthy Soup Diet has lots of recipes suitable for conventional low-carb and detox diets.

On the other hand, if you’ve bought this book just to be healthy, and don’t need to lose weight, then simply add the soup recipes to your normal diet. A large bowl of soup can provide the recommended three servings a day of fresh vegetables, which help to prevent cancer and heart disease. And there are fruit soup recipes too. The recipes are full of power foods to help rejuvenate your body systems, balance your hormones and combat the effects of stress.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

The Big Healthy Soup Diet can help you to

 Reach your ideal weight and keep it there

 Prevent future illness

 Combat ailments or health problems

 Enjoy eating healthy foods

Losing Weight and Looking Good

Read Part I to find out how soup and its power ingredients can help you to lose weight. This section also gives two special health programmes. Programme 1 is a four-day mini-detox to help you clean out your system, shed some water retention and start getting into a more healthy state. Programme 2 is the 10-day Big Healthy Soup Diet to help you reach your ideal weight. Designed to help you shed both fat and water retention (a common cause of excess weight), this 10-day diet could enable you to lose up to 10 lbs

Staying Healthy with Soup

Read Part II to find out about soups that can help you and your loved ones reach a ripe old age without too many visits to the doctor. We all know that you are what you eat, and how important it is to consume lots of vegetables. That’s not always as easy as it sounds. But eating lots of delicious soups with the right ingredients makes it so much easier to cut down on foods with the wrong ones! This part of the book tells you about soups that can help to prevent high blood pressure, gallstones, memory loss and even breast cancer. It also reveals the latest amazing discoveries from the world’s top research establishments.

Feeling Good with Soup

Part III is about using food as medicine. Thousands of doctors all over the world now specialize in this very effective way to treat problems with hormones, energy, bones, joints, nervous system and blood pressure. Eating the right soups could make all the difference. Soup can actually help to rejuvenate your glands, organs and other systems. It provides the intense nourishment needed in order to combat ailments more effectively. And what could be a more mouth-watering way to take your medicine?

Enjoy Eating Healthy Foods

Part IV of the Big Healthy Soup Diet is the delicious recipes. Turn straight to this section if you are just looking for a tasty starter or a one-pot meal. You are sure to find something tempting, and all the soups are bursting with goodness. Some are so quick and easy to make that you may never again buy soup in a can!

WHY SOUP?

Although some weight-loss plans involve special techniques like cutting out carbohydrates, most people still tend to think of eating fruit and salads as the best way to lose weight. Apples, lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes are very low-calorie foods. You can fill up a whole plate with these items and still consume only 100 Calories. It seems logical that if you eat only 100 Calories for lunch, you must lose weight…right?

Well, maybe. The big problem is that most people who use this approach can’t stick with it for very long. After bingeing on chocolate a couple of times and giving up the diet in despair, these individuals (and you are probably one of them!) usually blame themselves for their ‘weak willpower’.

In fact, we now know that there is a very good reason why this type of diet is doomed from the start. Salad foods are cold. Too much cold food can make you feel depressed, especially if you are a chilly individual and feel the cold easily. Depression is also a ‘rebound’ effect of excessive deprivation. It leads to an overwhelming desire for comfort

(1,000 calories = 1 Calorie or kilocalorie. Throughout this book the word ‘calorie’ refers to ‘kilocalories’.)

foods—most of which are, of course, loaded with excess calories. This is a physical desire. It has nothing to do with being greedy or weakwilled. Your body is desperate to get warmth and energy and it forces you to crave foods that will quickly satisfy those needs. Modern weight-loss science isjust beginning to recognize this problem, and to work with it rather than against it.

Traditional Oriental wisdom has understood the problem all along. In Oriental medicine, too much raw or cold food would be considered to encourage weight gain as it depletes the body’s ‘fire’ or Yang energy (metabolism). Hot chunky soups made with lentils and moderately flavoured with garlic, onion, cayenne, chilli and ginger are much more energizing. Oriental experts believe that such foods burn off excess water in our bodies, and this is of course very good news for sufferers of water retention—a common cause of overweight. Don’t overdo these spices—burning your insides would be counterproductive and unnecessary.

The warmth of soup makes you feel full as salad rarely can. Soup itself is a comfort food. But owing to its water content and healthy ingredients, this is a low-calorie comfort food and there is no problem with extra helpings. You won’t eat any more calories than in the average salad. But the results are far superior:

 Fewer cravings for sweet, starchy and fatty food

 Much improved ability to stick to the diet

 Faster, more successful weight-loss

SOUP RESEARCH

Even scientific researchers agree that soup has some very special properties. In 1999, Barbara J. Rolls and Elizabeth A. Bell of Pennsylvania State University discovered that feeling full doesn’t need to depend on the number of calories you eat. If you know how, you can feel full just by making each calorie more filling. How do you do this? By adding hot water to your food to make soup! In this study, 24 young women were fed a 270-calorie appetizer of chicken-rice casserole—first on its own, second with a glass of water, and finally by adding the glass of water to the casserole and serving it up as chicken-rice soup. Then the researchers measured how much lunch the women ate afterwards. The results were incredible. After the casserole or the casserole/glass of water they proceeded to consume 300 calories for lunch. But after a bowl of soup, they could only manage to eat 200 calories. That’s a one-third reduction! Nor did they get hungry earlier or eat a bigger dinner later! It seems that when water is incorporated into food the body becomes satisfied much more easily.

This is a whole new area of weight-loss research, and several more studies are summarized at the end of this chapter. It is another interesting fact that, according to the research, chunky soups are more effective in controlling appetite than smooth, pureed soups. All this helps to explain the success of the Cabbage Soup Diet made famous by Dolly Parton. But cabbage also has some special properties of its own, as you will find out later. The Big Healthy Soup Diet includes five new and delicious recipes for cabbage soup.

INGREDIENTS THAT KEEP YOU FEELING FULL

With the right ingredients, soup can be even more satisfying and keep you full for even longer. It can also help to balance your hormones, and this is essential when you want to burn off your body fat.

Three ingredients that help weight-loss when added to soup include:

 Fats and oils

 Protein

 Soluble fibre

Fats and Oils

It’s just so easy to say ‘Fats and oils are high in calories so cut them out and you’ll lose weight.’ This only makes people start cutting out the fats they can see: butter and margarine, cream, cooking and salad oils, meat fat and even the skin from chickens. In fact, eaten in moderation, none of these are a problem. It is hidden fats—the fats you can’t see— that really pile on the pounds. Foods with large amounts of hidden fat include:

 Biscuits and cookies

 Burgers

 Cakes

 Chocolate

 Creamy dips

 Creamy desserts

 Crispy snacks

 Deep-fried food

 Ice cream

 Pies and pastries

 Sausages and salami

For instance, have you ever read a recipe for making chocolate brownies? Most brownie recipes contain even more fat and sugar than they do flour. Every portion of pastry or pie-crust you consume probably contains at least two tablespoons of pure fat. You can’t see it, but just try pressing a few crumbs on a piece of paper and see the grease spots appear. Burgers can easily consist of up to 70 per cent invisible fat. Burger meat can quite legally be described as ‘lean’ even if it contains up to 30 per cent fat. Imagine how hard it is to lose weight if you keep eating too many foods like this. And imagine what they do to your skin—making it greasy and prone to blackheads as a result of clogged pores. Too much saturated fat also affects your blood circulation, and this is bad news for cells that make collagen. As you know, skin sags and shrinks when your collagen starts to deteriorate. You need to feed your collagen-making cells with the right food in order to stay looking young as long as possible.

High-fat foods also tend to make you feel sluggish. Vitality is attractive, but its opposite—sluggishness—is not!

The Big Healthy Soup Diet aims to make it easier for you to stop eating high-fat junk foods. One of its techniques is to include a healthy proportion of good quality oils, and occasionally even a little cream. When strictly controlled, these fats make weight-loss much easier.

They make your soups substantial, filling and delicious. If you find yourself craving junk food, have another helping of soup and the craving will be much less. It will cease to be a physical craving.

The hormone that makes you fat

Beware of trying to cut corners by cutting the oils out of the recipes in this book. It is tempting to think you might lose weight faster if you do, but there are several special reasons why you actually need these ingredients.

Fats or oils slow down your digestion and absorption of other food ingredients. This is why they help to control your appetite—food takes longer to get through your system when it contains a little fat or oil. Most importantly, fats or oils slow down your absorption of starches and sugars (carbohydrates). This makes you produce insulin more slowly. Insulin is a hormone that carries out many tasks in the body. It is essential to help you turn carbohydrates into energy, but you don’t want to have too much of it hanging around. High insulin levels occur when you eat too much carbohydrate. They

 Raise your cholesterol levels

 Slow down your loss of body fat

 Encourage your body to turn calories into fat

 Encourage water retention (by slowing down your excretion of sodium)

Can you see why it is positively beneficial to have some fat or oil in your diet? But if your thoughts are now wandering towards a bar of chocolate, try to stop them. It is your meals (soup) that must contain the oil. Your meals must be as satisfying as possible so that you won’t crave sugar and high-calorie snacks between meals. The fats or oils must also be nutritionally useful, providing monounsaturated or essential polyunsaturated oils, and the retinol (true vitamin A) and vitamin D that your body cannot get elsewhere. The meal must also be free of sugary items, since these will push up your insulin levels regardless of how much fat or oil you eat.

I hope it is becoming clear that there is a lot more to fats and oils than just calories. In fact, used in moderation as suggested in this book, oils should really be applauded because of their ability to control appetite and prevent excessive insulin surges. In moderation, some oils (such as olive oil) are also very healthy in their own right.

HEALTH BENEFITS OF OILS

Butter, cheese and cream provide retinol and vitamin D, needed by your bones, mucous membranes and immune system. It is difficult to get these nutrients elsewhere. Olive oil is known to have many health benefits and, like coconut oil, will combat harmful fungi which many people harbour in their intestines. Extra-virgin olive oil also contains an abundance of useful antioxidants. Soy and nut oils provide polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are vital for health. If you cut them out of your diet you can develop problems with your skin, hormones and water balance.

Protein

Protein as a weight-loss tool has been made famous by the Atkins diet. This diet cuts out carbohydrates and replaces them with protein, fats, oils and non-starchy fruit and vegetables. For a long time no-one really knew how the diet worked. Now that more research has been done, it is clear that people become full quite quickly when they eat mostly protein and fat, and they end up consuming smaller quantities of food and therefore fewer calories. By cutting out carbohydrates they also produce much lower levels of insulin and so avoid a major hormonal cause of weight-gain.

Protein is, of course, found in meat, fish and eggs. It is also a major ingredient of dairy and soy products, nuts, seeds, beans, chickpeas and lentils. Like fats and oils, protein takes quite a while to digest, so it keeps you feeling full for longer. But like carbohydrates, protein can also overstimulate insulin production if not consumed together with a little fat or oil.

Low-carb diets such as Atkins have gained a reputation that you have to eat a lot of protein. People are worried about this because too much protein dehydrates the body and makes it acidic. This acidity is harmful and stressful for your kidneys. In fact, low-carb diets don’t have to contain harmfully high amounts of protein. Instead of eating sugar

BUTTER, CHEESE AND CREAM? BAD IN EXCESS BUT GOOD IN MODERATION!

Retinol is the true form of vitamin A, and is found only in dairy products, eggs, liver and oils extracted from the liver of fish such as cod and halibut. Forms of retinol are also artificially added to margarine.

Fruits and vegetables are said to contain vitamin A but really they don’t. They do provide beta-carotene, which ideally should be converted to vitamin A in your upper intestines by the action of bile salts and fat-splitting enzymes. In fact, you have to eat quite a large amount of fruits and vegetables to make even your minimum vitamin A requirements, even assuming that all conditions in your body are ideal for the conversion.

Conditions are often not ideal. People with diabetes or an underfunctioning thyroid (a common condition, often not diagnosed until much too late) cannot make any vitamin A from beta-carotene. Children also make the conversion very poorly and babies not at all, which is one reason why they must not be given low-fat milk. Excessive consumption of alcohol, iron pills, recreational drugs and polyunsaturated fats can interfere with the conversion. Zinc deficiency is common and is also detrimental.

Carotenes are converted to vitamin A by the action of bile salts, but very little bile is released when a meal is too low in fat or oil. On the other hand, butter and cream not only provide ready-made vitamin A but also stimulate the secretion of bile. Polyunsaturated oils also stimulate the secretion of bile salts but they can destroy carotene unless sufficient antioxidant vitamins are present.

and other carbohydrates, you can fill up on liquid and on masses of fruit and vegetables. This will both prevent dehydration and help to control your acidity levels. Soup provides both liquid and vegetables, so you can gain all the benefits of a low-carb diet while minimizing the side-effects.

In this book you will be consuming mostly healthy forms of protein: fish, organic poultry and dairy products, lentils, beans and tofu. Nuts and seeds such as sunflower and sesame seeds are also included—for both their protein and the beneficial oils they provide. Very few of the soup recipes contain red meat. This is because the fat associated with red meat is not healthy. Also, the World Health Organization has found that people who consume red meat more than twice a week have a higher risk of developing cancer.

It is much better to eat white meat and to supplement this with olive oil, nut oils and with retinol—and vitamin D-rich fats from milk, cheese and cream.

Soluble Fibre

Dietary fibre absorbs liquid and so helps to bulk up the contents of your intestinal tract. This keeps you feeling full for longer after a meal. Adding bran to your food was one of the features of the F-Plan diet, which became popular in the 1970s. ‘F’ stood for fibre, and the diet involved consuming as much fibre as possible because this would reduce the calorie content of your meal while still keeping you satisfied.

But bran is not an ideal fibre for this purpose. It contains a lot of phytic acid, which forms complexes with minerals in your food and prevents their absorption. In large amounts, bran can also be quite irritating to the intestines, and is prone to causing gas. Nowadays we are more likely to recommend soluble fibre as a dieting aid. Soluble fibre is found in seeds, lentils, beans, seaweed extracts, fruit and vegetables. Like bran, it is indigestible, but unlike bran, it can be consumed by bacteria in your intestines and turned into useful fatty acids, which maintain an ideal acidity balance in your colon and support the health of your colon walls.

One of the best forms of soluble fibre is pectin. Found mostly in apples, cabbage and the white part of citrus fruit, pectin holds up to 100 times its weight in water. This excellent bulking action is very helpful for controlling appetite, especially if the pectin is in warm foods such as cooked fruit soups and cabbage soup.

PECTIN-RICH FOODS

 Apples

 Apricots

 Cabbage

 Carrots

 Citrus fruit

 Peaches

 Plums

 Prunes

Several research studies have also shown that consuming a lot of pectin can lower your cholesterol levels. Pectin binds to bile acids (released by your liver into your intestines when fats and oils are consumed) and prevents you from reabsorbing them and turning them into cholesterol. Pectin also helps to keep bile flowing, and this is beneficial as it means your gall bladder (which stores bile) is regularly flushed out.

The success of the Cabbage Soup Diet may be partly due to the pectin content of cabbage. In this book you will find several soup recipes containing cabbage. These recipes help to make cabbage more interesting, and some of them use spices which enhance the weightloss potential of this vegetable.

Psyllium husks (see Resources, page 277) can also be added to soup, and are a good thickener for soups such as Chinese Hot and Sour Soup (see page 224). These seed husks are an ancient Ayurvedic treatment for cleansing the intestines, and are extremely rich in a type of soluble fibre known as mucilage. Mucilage is also found in seaweed, and many commercial vegetarian gelling products such as agar-agar consist of mucilage extracted from seaweed. (Adding mucilage to liquids thickens and gels them.) Psyllium husks can do a similar job and are cheap and easy to use. Owing to their huge capacity for absorbing water in the intestines, and so helping to bulk out the stools, psyllium husks are used as the basis of many anti-constipation remedies. One tablespoon a day whisked into a large glass of water encourages regular bowel motions without causing discomfort or diarrhoea. Combined with soup, psyllium husks will absorb and gel much of the liquid, so to your stomach they will feel more like solid food and will help you to stay full for longer.