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

Chamomile: Promotes good digestion and helps you sleep

Dandelion root coffee: Helps to drain wastes from the liver

Fennel: Promotes good digestion

Ginger: Aids digestion and warms the circulation

Ginseng: Boosts vitality in older women during and after the menopause

Peppermint: Aids the flow of bile and promotes good digestion

Sage: Helps to relax blood vessels and promote circulation

If you have ajuice extractor, try making juices from a mixture of carrot, radish, broccoli stems and celery. Drinking a wine-glassful of this juice twice a day will help to rejuvenate your liver and aid the release of unhealthy water retention. You can flavour the mixture with lemon juice, which contains ingredients that help to dissolve gallstones. Whizz in some parsley for extra benefits. Better still, dilute the juice with a large glass of water and whisk in a level tablespoon of psyllium husks. Drinks made in this way will help to sweep out your intestines, where toxins can become embedded if you don’t normally have regular bowel motions.

You can stop at the end of the four days if you feel you have achieved the desired results. But if you feel good on this detox it will do you no harm to continue for longer.

All detox diets have side-effects, and this one is no exception. Be especially prepared for a day or two of headaches caused by withdrawal from caffeine. You may also feel a little tired and nauseous. These symptoms should pass as your body adjusts.

During the 10 days, eat only soups as directed. If you feel hungry between meals, snack on soup, if necessary taking one or two vacuum flasks of hot soup to work with you, or a container of ready-made soup which you can heat up at work if you have a kitchen.

If you wish to carry on losing weight after the 10 days, just continue on a soup-only diet, using the recipes in this book. Provided that you eat a soup from either the ‘Cabbage Soups’ or the ‘Substantial Soups’ sections at least once a day, you should not go short of protein. (Alternatively, to protein-enrich any of the soups in the ‘Starters’ section, add a portion of tofu or some poached fish or chicken.)

Since cow’s milk products can cause water retention in some individuals, select the ‘soy milk’ and ‘soy cream’ options where they are offered as an alternative. If you appear to lose a lot of water retention during the 10 days of this programme, you will need to test yourself to find out which foods could be involved. Waterfall Diet publications (see Resources, page 277) are specifically designed to help you do this.

This is designed for longer-term weight loss. It starts with the four-day detox and continues with a further six days of soups to warm your metabolism and help you continue shedding water retention. If you do suffer from water retention, this common problem can easily add 8 lbs to your weight. So you could lose 2 lbs of fat and as much as 8 lbs of retained water by the end of the 10-day programme. That’s a total of 10 lbs!

Research shows that starting a meal with hot soup helps you to reduce the amount of food subsequently eaten. So if you find a soup-only diet a bit too difficult, you can start any meal with a bowl of soup, and you should feel satisfied much more easily. You could also try an occasional ‘soup-only day’.

As you will see from the research at the end of this chapter, you cannot get the ‘soup effect’just by drinking a beverage with solid food. The body seems to be able to tell the difference between liquid that is consumed separately, and liquid which forms part of the food itself.

Reaching your target weight is often not the biggest problem with weight control: keeping it is. Yo-yo dieting is common, and is caused by relaxing your eating habits too much for too long once you have got rid of the excess pounds. We are all guilty of throwing caution to the winds after weeks or months of deprivation, and indulging in some ‘well-deserved’ binges. The problem is that we enjoy the binges so much that we can’t stop them, and all our old habits creep back again! After reaching your target weight it really is important to be especially vigilant. If you are longing to binge, then by all means do so, but set yourself a programme and ration your high-calorie binge foods on a weekly basis. Decide in advance how many treats you will buy per week and when you will eat them. Whatever happens, do not keep treats in the home. Even if the treats are for other members of your family, you must make sure that they are not available to you at times when you are not allowed to eat them, as you will be far too tempted to raid the cookie jar when you are a little bit bored, depressed or peckish. The only safe way to ration treats is to buy them as and when you are allowed to eat them, in the exact quantities you are allowed.

Another pitfall is to promise yourself that you will make up for unscheduled binges at a later date. Believe me, you won’t! The reason why you got overweight in the first place is that your favourite foods (usually sugar-rich foods) were just too addictive. Addictive behaviour is a slippery slope, and few people recognize it in themselves. If you understand this right at the start, you will have a better chance of keeping your beautiful new figure.

Soup is a fantastic aid to keeping your target weight. To help maintain your ability to resist snacking between meals, just continue to start each meal with a bowl of soup.

I have already mentioned that eating too many foods high in visible and especially invisible fats plays havoc with your skin (see page 6). Not only do pores get clogged, but blackheads form and greasiness develops. Fat slows down your blood circulation, and this reduces the supply of vitamins and oxygen to cells that make collagen. These cells may lose their efficiency and slow down collagen production. The less collagen you make, the more likely is the appearance of premature ageing. Not only does the Big Healthy Soup Diet have a carefully controlled fat and oil content, it is also very rich in nutrients which nourish your skin cells.

Dehydration from drinking too much tea, coffee and alcohol also harms your skin. Another benefit of soup is to give you plenty of liquid to help hydrate you.

Rich in dietary fibre, the Big Healthy Soup Diet also encourages regular, healthy bowel motions. This helps you eliminate toxins and soluble wastes, which could otherwise be absorbed from your intestines into your blood. Such toxins overload your kidneys and cause the typical sallow complexion of people who suffer from long-term constipation.

2005 Study at Purdue University, Lafayette, USA

Solid and liquefied versions of identical foods high in protein, fat or carbohydrate (containing the same number of calories) were given to 13 male and 18 female volunteers. Beverages were also tested. The participants completed questionnaires on mood, appetite and psychological state. Eating soup led to reduced hunger. Overall calorie consumption tended to be lower on days when soup was eaten compared with days on solid foods and beverages. Beverages had the least effect on hunger reduction. The researchers concluded that soup may help to reduce appetite.