The answer is yes. It works because soups have a low amount of calories, but a similar volume to cooked food, which means they make your stomach feel full after a soup meal.
Most diets get broken because the dieter simply can't ignore hunger pangs - with a soup diet there are no hunger pangs. When your stomach wall is stretched after a meal, it stops producing the hormone called ghrelin which tells your brain you are hungry. Therefore the hunger pangs are banished. You can eat as much soup as you want and will feel satisfyingly full, but because you've reduced the number of calories you are taking in, your body will burn fat to keep you going.
Soup diets only work with soups you make from scratch. Ready store-bought tinned soups don't work as they have too many additives including a lot of sugar (plus they have so much salt that if you just lived on tinned soup for every meal you'd get sick).
Types of Soup Diet Recipes
There are two types that work - vegetable soups (including the ubiquitous cabbage soup diet) and meat-based broth soups.
I personally prefer the broths, they provide more nutrients.
Here is a recipe for chicken broth soup:
You will need
- 1 pound or 1.5 pounds of cooked fresh chicken
- some vegetables like onions, carrots, green beans, parsnips, cellery, turnips (no potatoes though)
- a little bit of pepper, and other seasonings (garlic, cayenne or chilli), salt to taste
- some lemon juice
Cook the vegetables separately till they are crisp (stir fry them in a bit of oil). Then put them in a pot with the cooked chicken and cover with water and bring to the boil. Let it simmer for another five minutes. It should make about 20 cups of soup - i.e will last you quite a while.
Eating the same soups day after day can get tiresome. You might not be hungry but that part of the brain that craves variety will kick in. Therefore deal with it by trying as many different types of soup recipes as you can.
Please note that soup diets can't and shouldn't be sustained for more than a week.