Fad Diets: Cabbage Soup Diet

Beverages are limited to water, and unsweetened fruit juice on days when fruit is allowed. This is a typical outline of the diet:[3]

* Day 1 - Cabbage soup plus as much fruit as you like, excluding bananas

* Day 2 - Cabbage soup plus vegetables including 1 jacket (baked) potato with a little butter

* Day 3 - Cabbage soup plus fruit and vegetables excluding potatoes and bananas

* Day 4 - Cabbage soup plus up to eight bananas and as much skimmed milk as you like

* Day 5 - Cabbage soup plus up to 20 ounces of beef and up to six tomatoes

* Day 6 - Cabbage soup plus as much beef and vegetables (excluding potatoes) as you like

* Day 7 - Cabbage soup plus brown rice, vegetables (excluding potatoes) and unsweetened fruit juice

Recipes for the cabbage soup vary, but all are based on cabbage, onions, canned tomatoes, green peppers, celery, carrots, mushrooms and onion soup mix.

Here's a good recipe that I found:

1 head of cabbage, chopped

1 cup chopped zucchini/italian squash or yellow squash or a mixture

1 yellow onion, chopped

3 or 4 stalks of celery, chopped

1 cup carrots, chopped

1 can stewed tomatos

4 cups V-8 vegetable juice (or tomato juice if you like it plain) Low Sodium is best healthwise

1 cup water

A couple of sprigs fresh basil (or 1 tsp dried)

Salt and Pepper to taste

You can add fresh herbs according to your preferences. I usually add Mrs. Dash.

As an option you can add 1 pkg frozen corn for added sweetness, 1 medium potato chopped, or both.

Dump all ingredients into a large pot and bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium and cook until potatoes and carrots are tender. Simmer for 15 minutes, cool and enjoy!

This makes quite alot of soup. You can put it in Ziplock freezer bags and freeze what you don’t eat. You can eat as much as you like with no guilt, and it takes the edge off the hunger while you are getting accustomed to your new diet plan.

While this is a fad diet, and has been found to not provide adequate nutritional content I have found that this soup is a great beginning to most diet plans.