Start The Soup Diet
Over the last week or so I have been cooking for my partner soups to allow her to diet as easily as possible. The theory is that a soup can be made to feel filling while being low in calories and high in good stuff. This has been fine and in her first week she has lost 8 pounds in weight! The trouble is that all her work colleagues now want my soups as well, and my partner has put her foot well and truly down and said I am not cooking for the whole office, even though they are quite prepared to pay! But there is no reason why they cant have the recipe is there?
Well, that may be easier said than done, for when it comes to soups I do tend to just throw things at a saucepan and see what happens. But then I have been doing that with most of my cooking since I was ten years old, and that has not stopped me from writing a recipe before. My compromise, as you will see in the following recipes, is to tell you how to make a soup while allowing you freedom to choose your own quantities. This absolves me a little from the responsibility of getting quantities wrong, while hopefully allowing you to go your own way and have your own fun, and perhaps even lose some weight.
The diet itself is in two parts – what you eat and keeping you going.
Really, it does not need a fake nutritionist selling you loads of expensive books or courses for you to know how to diet. The theory is dead simple – lower the number of calories while keeping it healthy. The reason why there are so many diet books around are because a) they are ripping you off and b) they are trying to offer ways of keeping you dieting. And to be honest the keeping you on the diet bit is the hardest! Many systems use “treats” as a bribe – eat tasteless low calorie mush all week and you can have a cream cake at the weekend. Or they use unscientific things like “don’t eat late at night, you put more weight on.” Complete gibberish since the body has such a long cycle that it does not matter “when” you eat, only how much in total over, say, a 24 hour cycle.
My solution to the problem is in these recipes – I am trying to cook such rich tasty soups that eating them for the next 6 months or more is going to be fine, or at least not too boring, and the need for treats is going to be less. Also, with a little bit of bulk cooking, you can make a weeks worth, if you like, put them in the freezer and just heat them up. If good food is dead easy to serve, you are more likely to do it. Many of the celeb chef diets are so complicated that lets face of it, you wont last till Thursday. Of course, my partner is doing particularly well as all she is not even having to cook in the first place!
Personally, for me, who also needs to diet, if every meal is not tasty and satisfying I am just not going to get there. Now I have to admit here that I am not a great vegetable soup lover , at least, not all the time, but I will slip in some of the things that I am eating myself to keep things interesting. So this series is primarily going to be aimed at those who are fine with a nice bowl of veggies – sweet and rich and luscious. (and pretty cheap, too.)
The diet it self is simple. Porridge for breakfast (no sugar!) and then soup for lunch and soup for dinner. If you feel peckish, have something to drink, water, diet coke, orange juice, or chomp on some fruit. And that is it. I mean, how easy can this get?
The first soups will be:
- Mediterranean Veg
- Lentil and Squash
- Cauliflower and Squash puree soup
All of them will be thick, chunky, hearty and tasty. Go on, try it!
Related posts:
- Mediterranean Chunky Soup – The Soup Diet
- Hot Lentil and Roasted Squash – The Soup Diet
- Fast Soup
- Tomato Soup
- Best Chicken Soup
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Loading ...