With Day 4 on the cabbage soup diet Ive found a bit of a dip in energy again. One explanation of the cabbage soup diet says that at this point the body needs a burst of carbohydrates and other things to lessen the craving for sweets, which seems about right for how Ive felt. Fortunately as a consequence todays additional food is bananas and milk!
The plan allows you 8 bananas and as much skimmed milk as you can drink (or 8 glasses according to another page). To be honest milk doesnt really agree with me all that well (I think I may be mildly lactose intolerant it always makes me feel bloated and a bit nauseous although I love the taste and texture) so Ive replaced all but the first two glasses with unsweetened soy milk, which is a bit grim but in a banana smoothie (which is how Im drinking it all today) is almost undetectable. So all day Ive been enjoying delicious ice-cold banana smoothies. Not a bad diet this!
And tomorrow it gets better. Tomorrow I get my first meat since Sunday up to 20 ounces of beef. Im salivating (and planning obsessively) as I type this.
Ive been doing a fair amount of background digging on the cabbage soup diet, and the debate around it is quite fascinating (and often quite depressing in the sheer level of stupidity and poor argument). There really doesnt seem to be an original version of the diet, although there are several cash-in books (which Im not going to link to because Im not going to give them the support) including The New Cabbage Soup Diet and The Ultimate Cabbage Soup Diet. There is however a sizeable body of testimonials, on all sorts of pages and from different sources, from people who have used it and found positive results.
Most of these are detailed enough to be fairly convincing and in any case, who would try to artificially boost impressions of the diets effectiveness if no-one really owns it and most people use a free online version? The only one of these which I found mildly worrying was an article from Weight Loss at Families.com (now sadly unavailable), in which the writer calculated (with pretty convincing figures) that she lost a significant amount of lean muscle mass as well as fat. This is not an effect Ive found investigated anywhere else, so theres no verification from other sources.
The amazing thing is how many articles there are debunking or attacking the cabbage soup diet, and all of them poorly written, based on a bunch of assumptions and unverified statements, and often massively inaccurate. Ive found over 20 so far (Im not going to link to them, you can find them all on Google and theyre not worth the effort), all based largely on the same set of straw man arguments:
Its not a longterm weight loss solution of course its not, it lasts for 7 days!
It doesnt provide all the things the body needs which is why you dont do it for long.
Weight loss will be entirely from water and lean muscle tissue then prove it! This oft-repeated statement is completely unsupported by any research!
If you come off the diet and stuff yourself all the next day then youll put the weight right back on yes, and if you come off the diet and then stab yourself in the brain, you will die.
A handful of these articles lead into a final conclusion of So you should use MY diet, available for only $29.99!, which at least explains why theyre rubbishing this one. But a fair number are independent bloggers and writers. The only conclusion I can see is that a diet of this kind is an easy target with which to fill an article without doing any real research because its just a fad and easy to knock down. Maybe I shouldnt complain; lets face it, modern journalism and particularly internet journalism usually errs strongly on the side of less critical thinking (just ask Ben Goldacre). But this isnt smart critical journalism, its cheap and easy hit work based on a total absence of solid facts. Depressing.
Hopefully keeping a reasonably complete written record of my experiences on this diet (and after) will provide a slightly more accurate impression of its effects. Unless I drop dead tomorrow from malnutrition, of course.
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