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
