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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.
EXERCISE
The more accustomed your body gets to hard exercise, the faster your cells will use up and burn calories. But your cells do not just step up their metabolism during the period of exercise itself. Your metabolic rate remains high for up to 15 hours afterwards—so your calories will be burned up faster even while you are asleep.
To help you lose weight, exercise must be regular, and hard enough to make you sweat or breathe faster for at least 20 minutes, about three times a week. Examples are weight or circuit training, hill-walking, jogging, swimming and aerobics. You should also walk briskly or cycle whenever you can, use stairs instead of lifts and elevators, walk up escalators, do the housework twice as fast, and go dancing instead of sitting in pubs and bars. Try to park your car a few minutes’ walk from where you’re going. All these things make a difference.
Experts in physiology have known for years that a body with more lean tissue (also known as muscle) makes for a more rapid metabolic rate. But both men and women start to lose muscle in their 20s, which is why, by middle age, it can be so hard to lose weight. Muscle can only be regained by exercising. In a study carried out by Tufts University, eight men and four women aged 56 to 80 carried out strength-building exercises for 30 minutes three times a week for 12 weeks. This boosted their resting metabolic rate by an amazing eight per cent, and they had to consume an extra 300 calories a day to keep their body weight at the same level. Their muscles did not grow any larger on this programme, but they did become stronger and more metabolically active.
Strength-building exercises involve sustaining a muscle’s effort—holding the muscle in its position of maximum tension for as long as possible. Weight-lifting is the best-known but not the only form of strength-building exercise. The body’s weight itself can be used to sustain maximum muscular effort—for instance in sit-up exercises which involve remaining in the stomach muscles’ position of maximum effort for a count of 10.
Most people live within reasonable distance of a local health club with a gym. An instructor is always available to give a supervised training programme to meet personal requirements, and teach clients how to follow it.
Women please note that a few hours’ strength-building a week is very unlikely to result in hard muscles! On the contrary, improving the lean-to-fat ratio gives a woman a great shape and makes her feel lighter and more energetic for the simple reason that her muscles will find it easier to carry her around.
Strength-building exercises are best combined with exercises designed to build cardiovascular fitness. You can tell roughly what your level of cardiovascular fitness is by how easily you get out of breath. Cycling, swimming, running, aerobics and rowing are all suitable forms, and it is surprising how quickly your fitness improves if you practise any of these a few times a week, even if only for 20 minutes.
If you find it hard to motivate yourself to exercise alone, try finding an exercise partner who agrees to meet up with you on a regular basis.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BREAKFAST
Some people try to lose weight by skipping breakfast, but this isn’t a good idea. Breakfast stimulates your metabolism to wake up after an overnight fast. The speed of your metabolism determines how quickly you burn calories, so if you don’t eat breakfast, your metabolism may remain at its night-time rate—slow!
Some people say they feel less hungry throughout the morning if they do skip breakfast. However, this is because several hormones are working to conserve your blood sugar and slow down your metabolism. The hunger you may have experienced after eating breakfast was probably caused by eating the wrong kind of breakfast. A bowl of cereal or toast and coffee for breakfast is mainly carbohydrate. It will raise your blood sugar levels quickly, but the faster they rise, the faster they will also fall and the sooner you will feel hungry again. On the other hand, if you eat a more substantial breakfast which includes more protein and a little good quality oil or fat, you should feel satisfied and energetic until shortly before lunchtime On the Big Healthy Soup Diet you may find you need a little top-up mid-morning, but that doesn’t matter; you can eat as often as you like as long as it’s only soup!
SUPPLEMENTS TO AID WEIGHT-LOSS
Supplements of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA)—a substance found in dairy fat—have been found in clinical trials to help improve body composition. After dieting, the test subjects who were taking CLA supplements put weight back on mostly in the form of lean tissue, whereas the control subjects (those not taking CLA) put weight back on mostly in the form of body fat.
Another useful supplement is the amino acid carnitine. This regulates the rate at which the body burns fat. Your body makes carnitine from lysine and methionine, with the help of vitamin C and iron, but if you are not making the maximum amount which your body can use to aid fat-burning, it will do you no harm to get a little extra in the form of supplements.
As with all other supplements. CLA and carnitine should be taken in accordance with the directions on the product label.
POWER SOUPS TO AID WEIGHT-LOSS
SOUP DIET PROGRAMMES
The two soup diet programmes in this book have been devised for you depending on your needs. If you want to clean out your system, shed some water retention and start getting into a more healthy state, Programme 1: the four-day Mini-detox, is for you.
If, on the other hand, you have some weight to lose, you can go straight to Programme 2: the 10-day Big Healthy Soup Diet. (This starts off with the same four-day Mini-detox.) You can repeat the diet as often as you like until you have reached your target weight. Alternatively, after the 10 days just begin to sample the other delicious soup recipes in this book. They are all designed to help you shed pounds.
Programme 1: Mini-detox
This is designed to
Cleanse and begin to regenerate your digestive system
Balance your blood sugar
Reduce stress on your adrenal glands
Re-hydrate your blood after too much alcohol, tea and coffee—but at the same time release unhealthy water retention from your tissues
Eliminate excess acidity caused by too much meat, fat and sugar
Provide extra antioxidants to combat toxins
Start off the fat-burning process
The most essential part of any detox diet is to consume plenty of liquid. While cold liquids can actually cool and slow down some people’s metabolism, warm liquids and hot soup can energize you and provide all the special ingredients that help to clean out your system. Unlike most detox diets, this one provides protein in the form of nuts, tofu, beans and avocado, so it is also safe to follow for longer periods and can be repeated up to four times (a total of 16 days).
FOUR-DAY MINI-DETOX
IMPORTANT
Since you should not eat any other foods during these four days, make extra quantities of soup to eat as snacks. But don’t overload your stomach! Part of the detox process involves not giving your stomach so much food that it has difficulty digesting it. Never continue eating beyond the point of feeling satisfied. You should also drink plenty of plain water (2 litres/4 pints a day) to carry away the dissolved wastes in your blood. This water must be plain and unflavoured, otherwise it will have a reduced capacity to absorb wastes and toxins. In addition to plain water, you may also drink fresh fruit juice diluted with water, and the herbal teas listed in the box on page 25.
HERBAL TEAS FOR USE WITH THE MINI-DETOX
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.
Detox effects
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.
THE 10-DAY BIG HEALTHY SOUP DIET
IMPORTANT
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.
Programme 2: The 10-day Big Healthy Soup Diet
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!
OTHER WAYS TO DIET WITH SOUP
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.
MAINTAINING YOUR IDEAL WEIGHT
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.
SKIN HEALTH
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.
AMAZING DISCOVERIES ABOUT SOUP
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.
Mattes R. Physiol Behav. 2005 Jan 17;83(5):739-47.
2003 Study at the New York Obesity Research Center, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, New York, USA
Cholecystokinin (CCK) is a gut hormone that plays a role in satiety (feeling full). Levels of CCK rise after a meal, and this helps us to feel full. The researchers wanted to test whether soup quenches appetite by stimulating higher levels of CCK. They measured plasma CCK levels in eight healthy, non-obese men and women before and after eating 800 grams of tomato soup, followed 30 minutes later by 300 grams of a yoghurt shake. Appetite ratings were compared with CCK levels. It was found that eating soup significantly increased plasma CCK levels within 30 minutes in all subjects combined. Interestingly, the women’s average CCK levels were significantly higher than the men’s. The researchers concluded that eating soup may be especially beneficial for women who want to lose weight.
Nolan L.J. and colleagues. Nutrition. 2003 Jun;19(6):553-7.
1999 Research at the Pennsylvania State University, USA
Research has shown that adding water to foods can lead to reductions in the number of calories consumed. This study aimed to find out how water affected appetite when served separately with food or incorporated into food. Seventeen minutes before lunch, 24 women were fed one of three starters: (a) chicken-rice casserole, (b) chicken-rice casserole served with a glass of water, (c) chicken-rice soup. All the starters contained the same number of calories. The soup contained the same ingredients (type and amount) as the casserole that was served with water. The researchers found that turning the casserole into soup by adding water to it greatly increased fullness and reduced hunger. The equivalent amount of water served in a glass with the food did not aid fullness. Calorie intake at lunch was much less after the soup compared with after the casserole, whether water was served with the casserole or not. The test subjects did not compensate at dinner for eating less lunch.
Rolls B.J. and colleagues. Am J Clin Nutr. 1999 Oct;70(4):448-55.
1998 Study at the Nutritional Neurobiology Laboratory, EPHE, Paris, France
Twelve lean and ten overweight young men were given a starter consisting of (a) vegetables and water, or (b) pureed and strained vegetable soup, or (c) chunky vegetable soup. The soups were of the same composition and volume; only the size of the solid pieces and the distribution of nutrients between solids and liquid were different. All the starters were found to reduce hunger and subsequent food intake, but the chunky soup had the most pronounced effect. The researchers concluded that there may be special benefits in using chunky soups as part of a weight-loss programme.
Himaya A. and colleagues. Appetite. 1998 Apr;30(2):199-210.
1994 Study at the Centre for Human Nutrition, University of Sheffield, UK
The consumption of dietary fibre is known to prolong the feeling of fullness, but it was not known how. In this study on eight male volunteers, three per cent guar gum (a type of mucilage fibre similar to psyllium husks) was added to high-fat and low-fat soups. Guar gum delayed the emptying of the stomach for both types of soup, but the delays in the return of hunger and decline of fullness were far greater for the fatty soup. The fibre appeared to work by slowing absorption and prolonging the presence of nutrients in the intestines.
French S.J. and colleagues. Am J Clin Nutr. 1994 Jan;59(1):87-91.
1990 Study at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA
Three different starters—tomato soup, melon or cheese on crackers, all with the same number of calories—were served just before the main course. Soup was found to reduce the amount of food eaten in the second course much more than the other starters. The researchers concluded that eating soup could be beneficial in weight-reduction programmes.
Rolls B.J. and colleagues. Appetite. 1990 Oct;15(2):115-26.
PART II STAYING HEALTHY WITH SOUP (#ulink_1d361b66-9991-5f53-9d82-5f07504c31dc)
We all know that you are what (#ulink_eb01d97a-c863-5160-950d-bc85f0054cce)you eat, and how important it is to eat vegetables. But that’s not always as easy as it sounds. Some people find vegetables too bland, and children may refuse them altogether. But do you know anyone who doesn’t like soup? Soup can help you and your loved ones reach a ripe old age without too many visits to the doctor. A single portion of soup can hold a lot of power foods which protect you with antioxidants, flavonoids, essential fatty acids and dietary fibre. For instance, a soup made with tomatoes, beans, garlic, onions, parsley and shredded dark green leaves (cabbages, collards or spring greens, Brussels tops etc.) can:
Help to prevent heart disease and cancers (tomatoes, parsley, green leaves)
Lower cholesterol (beans and garlic)
Fight viruses (onions)
As regards preparing such a soup, the only limit is your imagination!
Add lemon juice if you like your soup tart and zingy
Or some Tabasco sauce or cayenne pepper if you prefer it spicy
Or purée the soup and add a teaspoon of cream and some Parmesan cheese
Can something so delicious really prevent ill-health? Don’t take my word for it; have a look at the research summaries at the end of this chapter (page 46). They are just a few examples of the many scientific studies that prove the tremendous health benefits of eating fruit and vegetables. They’re so much easier to eat when you make them into soup! All the studies come to the same conclusion: the more fresh fruit and vegetables you eat, the less likely you are to get clogged arteries, high blood pressure, heart attacks and cancers. It’s as straightforward as that. Once we had to take it all on trust that these major health problems (and the disabilities they bring) were food-related. Now it is no longer just naturopaths and alternative medicine specialists who are telling us these things, but doctors and scientists as well.
Next we need to ask ‘How much is enough?’ When I mention green vegetables, for instance, so many people say ‘I do eat greens so I must be okay.’ Then I discover they last ate them several weeks ago. This is actually a low frequency and puts the person in a high disease-risk category. If you really want these power foods to protect you, consider eating them every day. As you can see from the summaries on page 46, researchers recommend consuming 400-600 grams (1-1 ½ lbs) of fruit and vegetables per day. It’s so easy when you add them to soup!
Good soups to start with are Soup 1: Apple, almond and cardamom soup with sheep’s yoghurt, Soup 13: Traditional Ukrainian borscht, and Soup 34: Brown lentil soup with roasted sweet peppers and apricots. Or just work your way through the whole book to discover your favourite recipes, and put them on your daily menu!
POWER SOUPS FOR STAYING HEALTHY
Of course if you smoke, take no exercise, eat too much salty, fatty or sugary food and drink too much alcohol, then it is much harder for good foods to protect you. After all, no matter how much good quality engine oil you put in your car, it will still break down if you put the wrong fuel in the tank!
FOODS THAT NEED TO BE RATIONED
