The Winter Soup Diet
The benefits of a soup diet
According to research, persons who ate soup as the first dish of a meal used 100kcals (400kjs) less overall energy throughout the day than those who did not. Other research compared soup with melon or cheese on crackers as a pre-dinner snack, and it found that soup kept people feeling fuller for longer after their meal, compared to the other two snacks. Surveys of people who have successfully lost weight also seem to praise the benefits of soup, with dieters reporting that soup was an important aspect of their weight loss approach, helping them eat less overall.
Soups are the winter equivalent of summer salads due to the abundance of veggies they might contain. Soups produced primarily from vegetables can be low in fat and kilojoules/calories. Soups typically contain 50-250kcals (250-700kj), but the vegetables and fibre in them can suppress your appetite and cause you to eat a lesser part of your meal. This is because our stomachs tend to feel full when a specific amount or volume of food is consumed. Which is also why you find it hard to ‘stop once you pop’ open that bag of crisps or bar of chocolate, as they don’t take up much space in your stomach.
So could you just fill up on water instead? Both yes and no. Yes, you will feel fuller during the meal, but that feeling will be fleeting. However, when you eat water that has been mixed into the food, you tend to feel fuller for a longer period of time. According to research, when participants ate a meal of meat, vegetables, and rice blended together with water to produce a soup, they felt fuller for longer than when they ate the meat, veggies, rice, and water separately but as part of the meal.
What kind of soups help with weight loss
The best type of soups for weight loss are those that are based on vegetables and are tasty (so that you love eating them). If you are having soup in place of a meal, then have a soup that contains enough protein (around 20g per serve) and some high fibre carbohydrates for energy such as lentils or legumes. It can be difficult to incorporate enough meat in a soup to provide 20g of protein, which is why beans and lentils are so beneficial. Legumes and lentils can also add a thick and meaty texture to the dish, making it more gratifying and filling.
With 20g of protein and 4g of fibre, Tony Ferguson soups check all the boxes for a meal replacement. Furthermore, it includes several critical vitamins and minerals, including 40% of the required dietary intake of zinc and iron (both of which are helpful for the immune system during flu season).
