If you can boil a potato you can make soup, even if you’ve never tried before. Now that there are good quality fresh soups sold in cartons, it’s easy to enjoy soup more often, but they are expensive to buy. You can make your own in large batches and freeze some in individual portions ready for when you need to eat in a hurry.
The Facts
For the past few years various soups have been associated with diet programmes, the ‘Cabbage Soup’ diet being the most famous: The Cabbage Soup diet (or yummy yum diet, as it’s also known) still attracts a big following by promising ten pounds of weight loss in a week. As only two pounds of that could possibly be fat there doesn’t seem to be much point in it and certainly doesn’t sound like fun.
But don’t let that put you off your soup, because soup is great and there’s even some evidence that it really can help you lose weight.
In a recent study normal weight women are given a lunch of either chicken and rice casserole, chicken and rice casserole plus a glass of water, or chicken and rice soup. The soup contained the same ingredients as the casserole, but the women who ate the soup felt much fuller on fewer calories. Drinking water with the casserole made no difference. Interestingly, the ones who ate the soup didn’t go on to make up the calorie deficit later in the day.
Elizabeth Bell, one of the researchers, said, ‘A lot of the explanation is physiological. The women were presented with a huge bowl of food and it felt like a lot. If it could trick normal weight women, who successfully regulate their food intake, then it could be more successful with overweight women whose food regulation is less good.’
That seems to show that the best way to lose weight is to eat normally but, where you can, substitute vegetables and watery things for fat and high energy, dense food. But it doesn’t have to be cabbage soup – in fact, the more variety you can introduce into your soup the better.
Making your own soup...
