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
