The cabbage soup diet has been around since the early 1980’s, but no, there’s absolutely no way to track down the inventor of this so-called miracle diet. The diet is one of many quick weight loss plans that seems to gain in popularity for awhile every few years, then it will kind of disappear into obscurity again until someone re-discovers it and brings it back into the spotlight for another run.
One thing for sure about this diet is that whomever created it in the first place must have had a healthy sense of humor and a strong affinity for cabbage – or more likely cabbage soup. Cabbage is high in sulfur content, making the user uncomfortably gassy at the most unusual of situations.
Those who want to lose a healthy amount of weight will want to steer clear from the cabbage soup diet. For this diet to work, you will have to force your body into a starvation mode for a full week in order to lose 10 pounds of weight.
The problem with this process is that when your body is starved for long periods, it learns to adapt to the smaller amounts of food consumed. Once the diet is over, the body anticipates another food crisis and adjusts itself by storing weight again.
The diet becomes a vicious cycle that becomes hard to break once you start. In addition, the weight you lose in a week is made up of mostly water – which you will quickly gain back – and not actual fat content. So, after days of feeling hunger and discomfort, you will have accomplished nothing, really.
A healthy weight loss diet calls for proper nutrition and exercise – something that the cabbage soup diet does not provide. The cabbage soup recipe in the diet contains nothing essential for our body to live on.
Serious dieters – those who are overweight or want the pounds to stay off – will not want to use this diet plan. Because the diet does not promote healthy lifestyle habits, the psyche of the dieter will remain largely unchanged, leaving you to fall back on the same habits that brought you to the point of needing to lose weight in the first place, having learned no new healthier habits.
Anything worth having – like a lifetime of good health – should be worth struggling for. Using the easy way out, such as unhealthy diet plans like the cabbage soup diet, will only promote poor judgment. The dieter will always believe that constant starvation is the only way to lose weight. She learns nothing about choosing the right types of food that are low in saturated fat and sodium content and will most likely return to poor eating habits once she has lost the weight.
