Cabbage soup

The cabbage soup diet for weight loss, honestly

This soup is famous because of a diet: seven days of eating as much cabbage soup as you like, plus a fixed list of fruit, vegetables, beef and brown rice on certain days. The plan promises a loss of 10 pounds in a week. People often do lose several pounds, and there is no mystery about why.

The plan usually circulated goes like this, with the soup eaten freely every day:

• Day 1: fruit, except bananas.
• Day 2: vegetables, plus one baked potato.
• Day 3: fruit and vegetables.
• Day 4: bananas and skim milk.
• Day 5: beef and tomatoes.
• Day 6: beef and vegetables.
• Day 7: brown rice, vegetables and unsweetened fruit juice.

The original soup was made with a packet of onion soup mix. The recipe on this page can stand in for it. The same plan now also gets sold as a "cabbage soup cleanse" or detox. Nothing is being cleansed. Your liver and kidneys clear waste all the time, and cabbage does not make them work any differently.

Why people lose weight on it:

• Very few calories. A bowl of this soup has 85 kcal, so even a lot of it adds up to far less than most people normally eat.
• Mostly water, not fat. Cutting carbohydrates and calories this sharply drains the body's glycogen stores, and each gram of glycogen is stored with roughly three grams of water. Much of the first week's loss is that water.

The water comes back as soon as you eat normally again. Even a deficit of 1,000 kcal a day for seven days adds up to only about 2 pounds of fat, so of a 10-pound drop, a pound or two at most is fat. Most days of the plan are very low in protein, and a steep deficit with little protein costs some lean tissue as well. A week of it is unlikely to harm a healthy adult, though fatigue, hunger and gas are common. It is not suitable for anyone on diabetes medication, anyone pregnant, or anyone with a history of disordered eating. And there is no evidence that cabbage burns anything: the idea of "negative-calorie" foods is a myth.

Losing weight with cabbage soup, the way that lasts

The diet fails for a simple reason: it ends. Seven days of near-starvation teaches you nothing about how to eat in week eight, and the water comes straight back. Weight that stays off comes from a moderate deficit you can keep up for months. As a rough guide, a daily deficit of about 500 kcal adds up to about a pound a week. Our guide to how to lose weight covers the rest.

The soup itself is useful. It is cheap, it fills you up and it has very few calories. Use it as part of a normal diet, or a moderate calorie deficit, rather than in place of one:

• Have a bowl before lunch or dinner. A low-calorie soup eaten first tends to reduce how much you eat at the rest of the meal.
• Make it a full meal with protein. Stirring in 1 pound of shredded cooked chicken or browned lean ground turkey brings each bowl to about 14 g of protein with turkey, or 20 g with chicken. A can of white beans adds about 3 g a bowl, and more fiber.
• Keep a pot in the fridge for when you are hungry between meals. A chunkier vegetable soup does the same job with more variety.

Keeping the cabbage from going gray

Overcooked cabbage turns gray and soft and starts to smell sulfurous. That smell comes from sulfur compounds that build up the longer cabbage boils. Twenty to 25 minutes of simmering is enough. The cabbage should be tender but still a little green and holding its shape. If you reheat the soup, bring it just to a simmer rather than boiling it again. Our broccoli soup gives its florets four minutes for the same reason.

Cabbage soup with ground beef

Brown 1 lb of 90% lean ground beef in the pot before the vegetables, breaking it up, until no pink remains and it reaches 160°F. Spoon off all but a tablespoon of the fat and cook the vegetables in that, leaving out the oil. Use beef broth in place of the vegetable broth and carry on as written. Lean ground turkey works the same way. Stir in 1/2 cup of uncooked long-grain white rice with the broth and you have something close to an unstuffed version of cabbage rolls; add an extra cup of broth for the rice.

With 90% lean beef and no rice, a bowl comes to about 170 kcal, with 14 g of protein and 6 g of fat.

Cabbage soup in a slow cooker

Soften the vegetables and toast the paste on the stove if you can. It takes 10 minutes and gives the soup most of its flavor. Then put everything except the vinegar into the slow cooker and cook on low for 6 to 7 hours or on high for 3 to 4, until the cabbage is tender. Add the vinegar at the end. Cabbage turns much softer over this long cook than it does in the pot, loses its green and takes on a stronger cabbage flavor. The full recipe needs a 7-quart slow cooker; in a 6-quart one, use 6 cups of broth. For the ground beef version, brown the beef on the stove first and add it with everything else.

Variations

• Smoky: use fire-roasted tomatoes and add a pinch of chipotle powder with the paprika.
• Sweet and sour: add a tablespoon of brown sugar with the vinegar. That is closer to the Eastern European cabbage soups, and to the sweet-sour balance of Ukrainian borscht.
• Savoy or red cabbage: savoy is more tender and needs only 15 minutes. Red cabbage turns the soup purple-brown but tastes the same.

Keeping it

Four days in the fridge and three months in the freezer. It freezes well, since there is no potato or pasta to go grainy, though the cabbage softens a little more on thawing.

What it is worth nutritionally

About 85 kcal a bowl of about 1 3/4 cups, with 3 g of protein and 15 g of carbohydrate, including about 4 g of fiber. Cabbage is a good source of vitamin C and vitamin K. On its own the soup is too low in protein and fat to be a balanced meal. That is the main problem with the diet named after it, and it is easy to fix in a normal week of eating.