What if you drink (soup) more than your usual calorie intake per day

by Marie
(Ontario, Canada)

If your daily calorie intake is about 1800/a day and you drink your cabbage soup and the additional "allowed food" up to that amount, doesn't it void the whole diet concept? Therefore wouldn't it be false to say that we can "drink as much soup as we want". OR "the more you drink the more you lose"?

Hi Marie - thank you for this great question!

There are several aspects to consider: A calorie is not a calorie. Once a calorie enters your body, it's easier to turn food fat into body fat than it is to turn carbohydrate into body fat.

Nutritionists rattle off the 4-7-9 rule: A gram of carbohydrate or protein has 4 calories - a gram of alcohol contains 7 - and a gram of fat has even 9 calories.

But there is more. Jean-Pierre Flatt (University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester) explains that you pay higher energy costs for handling and storage of carbohydrates: 3 % to store fat as fat, 7 % to store carbohydrate as carbohydrate (in a form called glycogen), and 23 % to convert carbohydrate to fat.
What does this mean for the cabbage soup diet? For the cabbage soup (high in carbohydrates, low in fat and protein) your body needs more energy to digest it than it gets from the cabbage soup itself. That’s why often the expression "the more soup you drink the more pounds you lose" can be read in that context. And of course the healthy and purifying cleansing effect of the cabbage soup should also be taken into account.

It’s not only hard to convert carbohydrates into fat, your body seems even reluctant to do this.

Flatt, Jequier, fed young healthy people 700 grams of carbohydrate - that makes 2,800 calories. The result was a glycogen (carbohydrate) storage. He had then to give an enormous amount of carbohydrate to really see a net increase in fat storage.

Many researchers for weight loss now agree that if any diet is going to help take and keep weight off, it has to be low in fat.


Another aspect is that eating the cabbage soup at the beginning of a meal signals the brain to cut off appetit. But to achieve your calorie limit of 1800 calories per day you’ll have to consume at least 12 portions/12 cups/3 liters of cabbage soup = 1200 calories and e.g. at least 12 portions/12 cups/3 kg of vegetables = 600 calories. Try it and you’ll see, it is not very easy to consume such a high food quantity.


All the best,
Gabriela