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

These are important concepts in Oriental medicine. Yang represents male qualities (such as hard, dry, dense, hot, pungent) and Yin represents feminine qualities (such as soft, damp, loose, cool, sweet). For good health these should always be in balance. If they become out of balance, eating the right foods can help to correct any associated problems.

Excessive dampness leading to overweight suggests that there is too much Yin energy in the body and not enough Yang, so eating aduki beans (which are hard, dense and dry before cooking) or pepper and garlic (which are respectively hot and pungent) helps to correct the imbalance.

Always bear in mind that Oriental medicine is about balance. So don’t overdo the pepper and burn your insides thinking that this will help you lose weight faster. It won’t!

Aduki beans and broad beans are considered good for soaking up dampness. The best part of the broad bean is the pod, and soup can be made with water in which the pods have been boiled. Mung beans and bean sprouts are also recommended if your weight problem is accompanied by an excessively hot constitution—that is to say if you feel the heat easily and suffer from skin eruptions.

To increase the Yang energy on which metabolism depends, Oriental medicine recommends the regular consumption of kidneys, liver (preferably from organically-raised livestock), shrimps and mussels.

Oriental medicine includes a great deal about increasing ‘fire’ or ‘heat’ in the body. Ayurvedic medicine also emphasizes the importance of supporting the ‘digestive fire’ in order to improve digestion and reduce unhealthy sedimentary deposits in the body’s tissues. Is there a Western equivalent? Indeed there is. Many so-called warming herbs and spices create the sensation of warmth in the body (ginger and pepper in particular). They are well-known circulatory stimulants and can

Aduki beans

Basil

Black pepper

Broad beans

Caraway

Cayenne

Chives

Cinnamon

Coriander (cilantro)

Dried orange peel

Garlic

Ginger

Ginseng

Kidneys

Leeks

Liver

Marjoram

Mung beans

Mussels

Nutmeg

Peppermint

Radish

Rosemary

Shrimps

Soybean oil

Walnuts

induce sweating. When consumed, they warm the circulation in the digestive system and bring the blood to the surface of the intestinal wall where it can more easily absorb nutrients from the intestinal contents. This is highly beneficial for both good health and appetite control.

The Oriental concept that overweight is caused by excessive dampness in the body is very interesting from a Western point of view. Not all excess body weight is fat. As pointed out in my book The Waterfall Diet, hidden water retention is extremely common and can add many pounds to the scales. From a Western viewpoint there are several causes of water retention, ranging from food intolerances (sometimes known as food ‘allergies’) to excessive salt consumption.

Food intolerances (allergies)

Protein deficiency (usually in people on very low-calorie diets)

Deficiencies of vitamin B6 and/or magnesium

Lack of fruit and vegetables

Lack of exercise

Excessive salt consumption

Anaemia

Some medications

Inflammation due to high toxin levels

Unexplained water retention can account for 10 lbs or more of excess body weight. If you eat the right foods all this water can be urinated away within a week!

The Waterfall Diet provides foods that help address these causes, and omits foods that could potentially contribute to water retention. Many of the soup recipes in this book are suitable for the Waterfall Diet (see the Index on page 131). If you want to see whether you need the Waterfall Diet, try consuming just these soups and nothing else for 10 days. If you spend a lot of time urinating and your clothes quickly begin to hang loose, then you definitely need to read more about the Waterfall Diet (see Resources, page 277) so that you can combat this problem on a more long-term basis.

If you have two or more of the following signs you may be suffering from water retention:

You have worked hard to lose weight using conventional methods, and found that you cannot get below a certain weight even by persevering for months or years

Pressing a fingernail firmly into your thumb-pad leaves a deep dent that won’t go away after a second or two

Pressing the tip of your finger into the inside of your shin-bone leaves a dent

Swelling of legs, feet or ankles

Your shoe size seems to increase as you get older

Rings sometimes seem not to fit any more

You seem to have a major swelling problem in hot weather

Your tummy is often tight and swollen

Breast tenderness (in women)

Premenstrual weight gain (in women)

Your weight fluctuates by several pounds within the space of only 24 hours

If you have a lot of weight to lose, the good news is that the Big Healthy Soup Diet is ideal to help you. But of course there is more to weight-loss than just eating the right diet. Exercise (see page 17) is equally important. And, due to the well-known problem of food

Don’t miss meals. Missed meals lead to much greater cravings for addictive foods. Eat extra portions of soup for the first two weeks while you are going through sugar withdrawal.

Whatever happens, never, ever keep your favourite addictive foods (such as chocolate) in the home, not even for your children.

Have a treat every day. It should be something you like but are not normally addicted to. For instance, if you used to eat chocolate bars every day, replace them with home-made hot chocolate drinks. The ‘comfort factor’ won’t be anything like 100 per cent at first, but after about two weeks it will reach the 80-90 per cent level. Commercial hot chocolate mixes are very high in sugar, so make your own by whisking cocoa powder and a little raw sugar into hot low-fat dairy milk or rice milk. Add a dash of vanilla for extra flavour. Every time you find yourself craving chocolate, take your mind off it by going to make yourself one of these drinks. Or eat a bowl of soup!

If you have consumed a lot of sugary foods and drinks in the recent past, you should take a good quality daily multivitamin with minerals (including chromium). This will help restore and rebalance your system and give your hormones the best chance of maintaining your blood sugar on an even keel, which will help control physical craving sensations.

addiction, not everyone finds it possible to cut down or stop eating comfort foods straight away, even if they follow a diet that leaves them never feeling hungry.

Food addictions can be as difficult to overcome as addictions to alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Chemical changes—perhaps the release of endorphins—occur in your body on eating the addictive food. These changes are experienced as pleasurable and comforting sensations, and the addiction comes from associating the food with these sensations. You can even begin to feel mildly depressed when the pleasant sensations wear off, and this can cause insatiable cravings that keep you eating the problem food, just as nicotine withdrawal symptoms—no matter how mild—keep people smoking.

Since most addictive foods are high in sugar, the depression may be due to the strong dip in blood sugar that occurs in some people a few hours after eating sugary foods. Eating or drinking something sweet provides an instant boost, but it starts the vicious circle all over again. A deficiency of the mineral chromium substantially aggravates blood sugar problems. Chromium is mostly found in whole-grain foods and gets very depleted when you consume a lot of sugary foods and drinks.