After the Cabbage Soup Diet

The Cabbage Soup Diet is an extremely restrictive dietary plan, lasting seven days, during which time you could lose anywhere from five to 15 lbs. As this is a relatively short-term diet, you will want to have a plan of action for transitioning off the Cabbage Soup Diet back onto a normal eating schedule as smoothly as possible so that you do not regain the weight. Find out what you can expect in your first few weeks off the diet and how to keep weight off for good.

Resuming Normal Eating

As the Cabbage Soup Diet is such a restrictive plan, you will not want to overstress your body by moving from such a low-calorie diet to your normal eating plan quickly. After completing the Cabbage Soup Diet, you should aim to transition back to "regular" eating gradually, slowly increasing your calories so as not to overwork your digestive system, as it will have become accustomed to the lower intake of food provided by the diet.

Sustainable Weight Loss

Another tangential benefit of slowly increasing your caloric intake is that you will be more likely to keep the weight off long term. If you immediately resume your normal eating regime after completing the Cabbage Soup Diet, your body will seek to immediately regain the lost weight. Your body does not know that you want to keep the weight off--it only knows that it was "starving" while you were on the diet, so it will try to use any extra influx of calories to regain its "normal" state--in other words, your pre-diet weight.

Lifestyle Changes

After a week of deprivation, you might be anxious to get back to consuming "real food." However, do not be so quick to pick up your old habits. After the Cabbage Soup Diet is the perfect time to take your new-found approach to nutrition and run with it, creating healthy habits that will last a lifetime. By continuing to eschew processed foods while focusing your meal plan around natural items like lean protein, fruits and vegetables, you will ensure that you never need a rigorous diet plan like the Cabbage Soup Diet again.

Benefits

The benefits to transitioning to a healthy, balanced diet after completing the Cabbage Soup Diet are threefold. First, you will solidify your weight loss accomplishments, giving your body additional time to get used to the new you. Second, you will carry forward the psychological discipline you learned during the Cabbage Soup Diet, allowing you to make healthy eating your default behavior. Finally, you will escape the perpetual cycle of yo-yo dieting, breaking free from the seemingly endless cycle of weight gain followed by crash diet after crash diet.

Considerations

Although making dietary changes is difficult, the optimal time to make progress is following completion of an even more rigorous routine like the Cabbage Soup Diet. The most important thing is to prevent yourself from binging and rebounding immediately when you stop the Cabbage Soup Diet. To ensure this, go through your cupboards and empty them of all junk foods that are not in compliance with your new healthy lifestyle.