Failed Diets and What Happened: #1 "The Soup and Salad Diet"

Firstly, I know it's been a bit of a while. For a start, my cooking got a little 'samey' and I felt I didn't want to bore all of you with minor variations on a theme. Second, life got very much in my way and I just didn't have the time for fiddling about on here. Expect my posts to be way more intermittent.

But since I'm all about Keto and the good things it has done for me, I thought I'd cover more than my fair share of diets that turned into disasters, and some posthumous analysis of what went wrong with it. Starting with this:

• Diet Name: The Soup and Salad Diet.
• Who put me on it: Mum-in-law.
• How it's supposed to work: it allegedly makes you feel full without getting as many calories as you're used to.
• Length of time I kept to it: 2.5 months
• How I fared on this fare:

Well. As you might guess, it did not go well. It was the first diet I did after I realised that I weighed slightly over 100 kilos[1]. And since I've never dieted before, I took the advice of my mum-in-law, who held great praise for eating nothing else but soup and salad. With an option for oatmeal porridge in the winters.

What I did was buy a variety of "soups for one" and a bunch of stuff I liked to have in salads, and about four salad dressings I could tolerate. What I did not know, and did not look for, was the serving size on the cans. Those "soup for one" cans actually contain two or three servings. That's a pitifully small amount of soup.

For the rest of the day, I had my "OMG Salad", which was about 2-3 kilos of mixed vegetable matter and a generous slathering of salad dressing. No fat beyond whatever was in the dressing. I would make an enormous bowl of this stuff and just... eat my fill out of that whenever I was hungry.

• The Exception: I could not survive without chocolate. I still can't hack it without a small dose of it. So I let myself have four squares of Cadbury Milk Chocolate per day. And one tin of fizzy drink if my day had been atrocious.

• The Failure Point: I was frankly darn S-I-C-K of soup or salad. Though I am a creature of routine, variety is indeed the spice of life. Towards the end of this period, I actually read the servings per can and flipped my... lid. As with all of my failed diets, the big hurdle was coming back to it after a party, where I could freely have all the fun food. Plus, as time went on, I had more and more bad days.

• End Result: Depression, lack of energy, inability to regulate internal temperature, general abhorrence towards tinned soup, and an overall tetchy-ness that my family could have done without.

• Retrospect Analysis:

Now that I know better, I can see the reasons why this failed so spectacularly. First, it was mixing carbs and fats (in the form of the salad dressing oils). Second, it was using tinned soup, which uses an abominable amount of carbohydrates as thickener and flavour enhancer. Loads of those 'ready to serve' soups contain huge chunks of potato, so I was getting more carbs from that as well.

And, since my mood is still altered by the daily sweet treat, I was actively seeking more carbs to try and make myself feel better. Rather like alcoholics go chasing after more of that depressant to "feel good".

Salads have their place. As a side to the main meal. They are not now and never will be the entire meal for me. I was missing out on vital nutrition and paying a heavy cost. My body was trying desperately to conserve what little it had, and leaving me with very little to get on with.

My next disaster was the "Diet Food Diet". Which I hope to cover tomorrow.

[1]: My ideal weight, according to the BMI people, is between 54 and 72 kilos. I'm holding steady at 77 FYI.

(Picture © (c) Can Stock Photo / MSPhotographics)