Diets Detox and Weight Loss Blog

Detoxing your body means removing lots of nasty things inside your body, such as toxins, by consuming particular foods and drinks. Differnt detoxes have differnt foods and drink you must take, and often very different results. Not everyone finds detoxing makes a huge differnce for them but for others it can make them feel like a new person.

The Secret Detox Diet (found here), makes some rather large claims, not only about what it can do but also about how bad your body is right now. With slogans such as live for longer and lose lots of fat without dieting, i thought it would be interesting to put this detox diet to the test.

How do you do the Secret Detox Diet?

Firstly you go to the page listed above and buy the doctors ebook. Its around $35 at time of writing – quite steep perhaps, but easily worth it if it lives up to its claims. But does it?

Lets quickly look at some more of its claims, as they are very interesting.

We are all fat apparently, not because we eat too much or the wrong foods, but because there are lots of parasites inside us that make us fat! Luckily a good detox likes this will wash them all out. Not the most convincing of claims to be honest, but coupled with the pictures on the site it suddenly becomes a lot more really and viable. But the truth is we all have parasites in us anyway, just they are not usually harmful as far as i know. The other statement that was of interest to me was that our bodies are lines with plague that is presumably slowly stopping blood flow and such, and slowly killing us. The detox also sees to that. Great!

Now sadly i cannot go into how to do the diet in great detail here as the information must be purchased, but i will tell you it is a natural detox – plants, herbs and that kind of thing. You only need to go on it for a matter of days but it will means a few days of huner (not starvation), or it did for me.

Results

Well a week after going on the detox i did feel better and i was down a few pounds (5 pounds). Did i lose parasites and plague along the way? Well to be honest i have no idea but i like to think i did. I will recommend this detox, but i cannot vouch for its claims even after completing it. Infact it was the weight loss and the extra energy i gained that really impressed me. Shame they didnt just concentrate on that on the main page of info. Once you are off the detox you are recommended to go back on to a healthy diet so whether the continuous weight loss was due to detoxing or going back to my healthy dieting i cant say. I do think its worth ago though, especially if you have never detoxed before!

The diet can be found HERE

Any food that makes you lose more calories than you put on just by eating them are no good for an entire diet, (it would result in malnutrition) but as snack foods these things can be fantastic. These foods are also known as negative calorie foods. Usually it means the foods have calories, but so few of them that your body spends more than it gains eating and digesting them.

Celery – Quick example

Celery is a fantastic snack food. A single stick of celery contains around 4-6 calories. You will use about 10-12 eating it. Fresh celery tastes great, can be eaten raw with no preparation and will fill you up (eventually) as it contains lots of water – a great appetite suppressant.

List of Negative Calorie Foods

Berries (certain berries such as blue berries at least)

Cabbage

Celery

Cucumber

Garlic

Grapefruit

Grapefruit

Green beans

Hot Chilli’s

Lemon

Lettuce

Radish

Spinach

Tomato

Turnip

Water Melon

Cardboard (its edible just about, is negative in calories but really not recommended!)

These are most of the negative calorie foods. There are others people claim are negative calories, such as apples , peaches and plums but it seems unlikely considering they usually contain around 100 calories.

Try and replace sweets with sticks of celery, puddings with a slice of watermelon, your usual snacks with a slight salad made up of a few of the above, etc.  If you do this it will really be a bonus to your diet. Just remember not to replace proper meals with them!

For now i have missed out B diets and jumped on to C. The only B i could think of was the blood type diet – where you eat foods thats are only meant to be for your blood type – but with no scientific evidence of it helping iv decided to avoid it, at least for now and move on to the C’s…

The Cabbage Soup Diet

This is a short term diet that is usually thought of as a fad diet. It will or should result in quick but short term weight loss. It should only be done for one week at a time (and then a couple of months off) for a special occasion/holiday. The diet allows you to have as much cabbage soup as you wish for an entire week, whilst having a limited amount of particular other foods throughout the week.

Origins

The cabbage soup diet first became mainstream around 20 years ago. Who created it is still unknown but i would like to go out on a limb and suggest it was somebody that either liked cabbage soup or could not afford much more cabbage soup and as such had it regually. This person noticed they lost weight eating it, and the cabbage soup diet was born. That is just speculation however, and it is more commonly thought to have been created by military institutes as a high fiber get-in-shape quick meal plan.

How do you go on the “Cabbage Soup diet”?

As described above, you are allowed to eat as much cabbage soup as you can stomach. Cabbage is sometimes referred to as a negative calorie food, and tap water should contain zero calories and as these are the two main ingredients you can understand why you are going to lose weight fast.

Tips

On each day of the week you are allowed a secondary food source, such as fruit or rice.

Drinks should be water only (unless you are on a fruit day, in which case you could drink pure fruit juice).

It is not a sustainable diet, you do it for a week then return or transfer onto a regular diet, such as weight watchers.

If you are feeling ill, stop the diet. You are probably not getting all the food your body needs.

If you are bored of the soup, spice it, herb it or put a little salt in it. I like pepper so used plenty.

Try vitamin tablets daily to make up for the lack in the food you eat. They may or may not work, but its worth taking them just in case.

Cabbage soup meal plans

This is a typical cabbage soup menu for the whole 7 days, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Day 1 – Cabbage soup + as much fruit as you like (but no bananas)

Day 2 – Cabbage soup + vegetables including 1 baked potato with a small amount of butter

Day 3 – Cabbage soup + fruit and vegetables excluding potatoes and bananas

Day 4 – Cabbage soup + up to eight bananas and as much skimmed milk as you want

Day 5 – Cabbage soup + 20 ounces of beef (at most) and up to six tomatoes

Day 6 – Cabbage soup + beef and vegetables (no potatoes)

Day 7 – Cabbage soup + brown rice, vegetables (no potatoes) and pure fruit juice

Review

I did this diet a long time ago and have trouble remembering it all. I do remember making a big mistake the first couple of days on it, and having nothing but cabbage soup and water. That is not right for this diet – do that and you are starving yourself.

The diet was a struggle – half way through when i would get hungry my body hated the idea of drinking more soup. But i completed it, i lost around 7 pounds and i never did it again.  7 pounds sounds good for a week diet but i will go into that in the next section.

Criticisms

A strong criticism of this diet is that most of your weight loss will be water that your body usually retains. The more liquid you drink the less you retain so after a diet of liquid you have less water and weight less. I can back this up with the fact i put back on most of the weight a couple of weeks later even though i was still eating healthily.

With a rapid diet like this you are going to lose as much muscle as you do fat and that is not a good thing, seeing as how organs such as your heart are muscle (unless you are doing a bit of exercise too).

Most people overdo the salt in the soup to make it palatable. That has other repercussions for your health.

Is it for you?

It may be worth trying if you need to lose weight quick for a good reason and you realize that it is not a sustainable diet, that when you finish you need to move on to a proper, healthy diet.  I don’t recommend yo yo diets, as i feel this one could easily become, so be aware of putting the weight back on after and do not do this diet too regularly.