Cabbage Soup Detox Diet
Here’s an easy diet, called the cabbage soup detox diet.
This diet will not only help you to detox your body, but as an added bonus, you could lose as much as ten pounds. Some people say the weight loss is temporary, but weight loss is only as temporary as you let it be. When I do a detox, or any diet for that matter, I spend the next few weeks working extra hard to make certain I keep that weight off.
As with any detox, I’ve found that you can do the cabbage soup detox diet for a week with no ill effects. It’s only a diet, and it’s only a week. The good thing about this diet, is that while you can eat the soup, as much as you want of the soup, every day, you can eat other items as well. As you’ll see, each day has different items you can eat in addition to the soup to make it seem less boring.
What you won’t find on this diet are a lot of carbohydrates, and there’s no sugar allowed. You should avoid soft drinks like sodas, alcohol and tobacco as well. This is the way you help your body to detox: by not allowing all those toxins to enter your body in the first place and helping those that are in your body to make their way out. It’s also important to eliminate all processed foods for this week.
What can I eat on the Cabbage Soup Detox Diet?
So what is allowed on this diet? Simple, basic foods.
Fruits, vegetables, and on some of the days you can include some meat, perhaps a potato or some rice. Easy, right? Hunger should not be an issue because you’re allowed to eat as much as you want of the soup each day, as well as the other items listed, different items for each day.
I love this diet because I can run out back to the garden and grab a basketful of veggies and herbs, chop them up and pop them into the pot. Next thing you know, I’m eating healthy and losing weight and a bunch of nasty toxins.
The only hard part about the cabbage soup detox diet would be the restrictions on the items allowed. Just take it easy and enjoy the clean, refreshed feeling of ridding your body of those toxins.
After a week on this program you’ll feel recharged and much more able to stick to a sensible eating plan. That, and some exercise, and you can really see a change in the way you look…and feel.
Let’s look at the cabbage soup detox diet plan:
Rule number one is that you can eat as much of the cabbage soup as you want on every day of the diet. You can find my recipe for cabbage soup for this diet on my cabbage soup recipe page here.
Rule number two is to drink lots and lots of water. The basic rule for getting enough water is to take your weight in pounds, divide it by two, and drink that many ounces of fresh, pure water each day. This goes for while you’re on the diet, and for every day of your life. Don’t count any other liquid as water. Water is water and nothing else is water. Go ahead and drink lots of unsweetened tea as you like, but don’t count it as part of your allotted water.
Rule number three is to avoid toxins like alcohol, carbonated beverages and tobacco. ( I know it’s hard to avoid tobacco if you’re a smoker, but do your best.) Also, no bread while on the diet. Try to make your tea either green or white tea, or a nice healthy herb tea. A little extra detox never hurt anyone.
In addition to the cabbage soup, you can eat other items each day. For the seven days of the cabbage soup detox diet, here are the items you can eat each day.
- Day one – you can eat an unlimited amount of fruit, fresh fruit is best, but no bananas. Be sure to avoid sugar in any canned or dried fruit you might eat. You can also have unsweetened tea, cranberry juice and lots and lots of water.
- Day two – Eat all the raw and cooked vegetables you want today. Avoid beans, peas and corn. You can have one large baked potato with a little butter. Also, you can eat all the fruit you want, but again no bananas.
- Day three – Today you eat fruits and vegetables, raw or cooked. No bananas and no baked potato.
- Day four – You can have up to eight bananas and all the skim milk you want.
- Day five - Today you eat ten to twenty ounces of lean beef or chicken (with the skin off) and all the vegetables you want.
- Day six – Eat as much low fat protein (beef, chicken, fish) as you want, and veggies. No baked potato today.
- Day seven – For the final day of the diet, eat as much brown rice as you want. Also you can have unsweetened fruit juices and as much veggies as you want.
Try to eat organic as often as you can, to reduce the toxic load you place on your body. And the more raw fruits and veggies you eat, the better it is for your body.
Those wonderful raw fruits and vegetables provide your body with the essential enzymes it needs to do the job of detoxing. The fruits and veggies allowed on this diet are also wonderful for getting a huge dose of antioxidants. This is another reason the diet is such a good detox diet.
When fruits and veggies are allowed, consider juicing them. This is a wonderful way of getting the added benefit of concentrated enzymes and nutrients those wonderful fruits and veggies have packed inside.
Use this diet as many as four times a year. Every three months is maximum. The reason is that it’s not a healthy diet for use over an extended period. Some diets are meant for detox, but not as a long-term solution.
