The Cabbage Soup Diet is a low-calorie, low-fat, high-antioxidant diet that was created to detoxify the body and provide nutrients and phytochemicals to help you drop pounds, water weight, and lose weight quickly. It contains very little calories and is loaded with vitamins and minerals.

It uses a structured (and very strict) menu for just one week. You can lose as much as 10 to 15 pounds in that week.

On the first day, only fruits and milk are allowed. The next day, you can eat vegetables and milk. After that, it's bananas and milk. Eventually, even meat is allowed. But you can have all the cabbage soup you can eat every day, as often as you like.

The cabbage soup diet is somewhat of an elimination diet. Elimination diets remove certain foods from the diet for a period of time, and then reintroduce them slowly (or suddenly if checking for allergic effect). Elimination diets are usually used to find out what foods a person is allergic to. Once that is determined, the offending foods are removed from the diet permanently.

Elimination diets also make digestion easier because less enzymes are needed. Normally proteins require different enzymes than carbohydrates. And fats require their own set of enzymes. The enzymes are secreted by the digestive system. Ingesting less variety of foods requires less enzymes and gives the digestive system a break.

The main thing about the Cabbage Soup diet is that restricting foods lightens the load on your body and makes digestion easier — while the antioxidents and phytochemicals in the cabbage soup help detoxify your body and help it work more efficiently.

But don't get the idea that this is a wise long-term diet. While its great for short-term, it's lacking in protein and carbohydrates on most days — the main building blocks for your body. This makes it a fine short-term detox, but not suitable for much longer than that.

Does the cabbage soup diet work?

Some say it does and some say it doesn't. But some people do lose 10 - 15 pounds.

If you regularly eat junk food and drink soft drinks, this diet will probably work very well for you. Anyone who eats junk and drinks soft drinks is robbing their body of nutrients while making their organs work very, very hard. Junk foods also plug up your entire body - your digestive system, your heart and circulation, and your lymphatic system.

The cabbage soup diet would work as a good detoxification program, if for no other reason than being a huge change from high-fat, processed, chemical-laden, overly-sweetened, nutrition-empty junk food.

Any change from that kind of diet to whole foods would help. But specifically with the cabbage soup diet, the high amount of nutrients in the diet and the low amount of fat provided in easy-to-digest form can be beneficial to the body for short periods.

… Unless you have difficulty digesting cabbage, as many do. A bad case of gas can make this diet very unpleasant.

Advantages:

• The good thing about it is, you can eat as much Cabbage Soup as you want each day. In fact, the more you eat, the more weight you usually lose (probably because you're getting more supernutrients).

• You don't have to buy expensive diet products.

• Minimal amount of cooking.

• You can lose weight quickly

Disadvantages:

• A diet of cabbage soup can get very monotonous when eaten every day, several times a day.

• Your food choices are limited.

• The daily food plan needs to be followed carefully for maximum results.

• You can gain back the weight you lost quickly if you return to poor eating habits.

• You might have gas.

• You might feel light-headed and weak.

• It can take quite a bit of willpower to stick to (especially if you don't like cabbage soup).

• If you are intolerant of either milk or cabbage, this diet is not for you.

Comments:

It would not be unusual to get a little weak and light-headed initially with a diet like this. For a normal, healthy person, this is not a serious problem. However, if you are a diabetic or have blood-sugar imbalances, the cabbage soup diet is NOT recommended.

It could also be impossible for someone with lactose intolerance or who gets gastric problems from cabbage to go on this diet. If you discover you have problems with either the milk or the cabbage while on this diet, go off of it immediately. Or take lactose pills with your milk, and enzymes to digest the cabbage.

The cabbage soup diet diet is especially effective for quick, but temporary weight loss. As with any other successful diet plan, you must make lifestyle changes to maintain your ideal weight.

Be sure to consult your doctor if you have any health concerns.

Suggestions:

Why not make it healthier? Lipton soup and bouillon cubes are loaded with salt, additives and MSG. That's not healthy for anyone. I suggest making your own stock. It's not that hard, but it takes a little time.

Simply rinse a chicken (not an ordinary chicken, use a free-range, non-antibiotic, non growth-hormone chicken). Place in a large soup stockpot. Cover with water. Add some salt and bring to a boil. Skim the foam. Lower heat and simmer for about 2 hours, or until the meat falls off the bone.

Turn the heat off and cool a bit. Remove the chicken in pieces with a big slotted spoon or ladle. Strain the broth through a sieve. Refrigerate until needed or continue making Cabbage Soup diet.

When it comes to vegetables, the fresher the better. Try to get a tasty organic cabbage from the Farmer's Market or fresh produce store. The difference in flavor can be astounding!

The same goes for all the vegetables in the soup. If you have no other option than the grocery store, chose a heavy cabbage. The lightweight cabbages are usually old, dried out and tasteless.

Season your cabbage soup and everything you eat on this diet with herbs, and use less salt.

Use sea salt from the health food store, rather than the iodized grocery store variety (we all get so much iodine from salt in our diet that we're overloaded now).