Its day 5 on the Cabbage Soup Diet, and Im feeling pretty good all over. All in all this has been the easiest diet EVER. Ive lost another half a kilo, and with no significant discomfort, illness (except for the zinc side-effects) or (lets face it, a significant concern)antisocial digestive consequences. Its a little harder to give an objective assessment of feeling today, to be fair, because I slept really badly (due to too much stuff on my mind probably shouldnt have started playing with blog indexing at 11pm!). But I feel good in my body, energetic despite the tiredness and comfortably fed.
Of course it helps that today is a MEAT DAY! Yay! Today I get to eat up to 560g of beef and 8 medium tomatoes as my additional food. I started early (couldnt wait) with a beefy breakfast of a pasta-less bolognaise so as to incorporate the toms I browned 200g of good minced beef in a pan, while food-processing 3 of the toms with two cloves of garlic (not technically on the roster but a very small deviation I think, and my first), a few leaves of basil, black pepper and salt. Then I stirred the tomato mixture into the mince while slowly simmering until it was a rich red beefy sauce, and dug in with relish.
Never has meat tasted so good. Just the texture was heavenly, and the beef had depth of flavour and complexity that Id never tasted before. It speaks for the power of deprivation to sharpen your enjoyment. Honestly Id do the whole thing again just for that experience.
Later Im going to marinate some rump steak in pounded tomato to tenderise and sharpen the flavour, then make it into small beef-and-tomato kebabs I can chew on through the afternoon and evening to draw out the pleasure (and pace things for my meat-deprived digestive system). Ive just had my lunch bowl of soup, this time with a dash of smoked paprika to liven it up, and its still not too dull, let alone offputting.
Funnily enough and I would never have said this before Im already missing the other raw fruit and veg. Right now Ive got a real craving for a carrot to chomp on to top off my mostly liquid lunchthis may leave me with a good longterm change of appreciation in food groups!
Yesterday I dug through a bunch of journal databases looking for anything like a peer-reviewed controlled study of the cabbage soup diet. Through my Athens student login I tried Ovid, all the Medline databases, the AMED Allied and Complementary Medicine archive, British Nursing Indexes, and even PsycINFO, and I also looked on Pubmed and Google Scholar nowhere was I able to find a single scientific study (or indeed any kind of serious trial) of the diet. Looks like this debate will continue to be unsupported by any valid medical data.
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