You might be curious as to why I would say never again to cabbage. That’s what makes vegetable soup delicious. Right? Think about it. Cabbage and ham with potatoes. Cabbage with kielbasa? Fried cabbage? Sweet and sour cabbage with bacon? All these and more are wonderfully delicious dishes prepared with…..cabbage. Why is cabbage off our menu list then? Read on….

There have been a couple of times when my husband and I thought we would go on a quick and healthy diet. We heard of the Cabbage Soup diet, and we thought we would give it a whirl. It sounded wonderful, healthy, and edible. It verged on a normal homemade vegetable soup without any meat. The catch was to eat this soup as much as you wanted and for every meal for seven days. In reading about the diet, it sounded as though it was something we could accomplish….together.

I got out my biggest Le Creuset soup pot that holds a lot of ingredients and doubled the batch. The items in the soup sounded scrumptious. Carrots, onions, fresh green beans, V-8 or tomato juice, vegetable broth, bell peppers, celery, and of course, a head of chopped cabbage. Imagine this cooking and simmering for a couple of hours. The aroma would be just so fragrant as you probably added seasonings such as thyme, baby leaves, and parsley. This would be a great healthy soup for the week!

Day one came and we gobbled down the soup with no problems. The next day we noticed some abdominal gas from all the vegetables, but we carried on with dining on the cabbage soup. By the third day, the soup was having definite effects on our intestinal system, and we were very happy to have more than one bathroom. On the fourth day, we were starting to wish for at least a grilled cheese sandwich with our soup. We were craving carbs badly. However, we persevered through day four, and I think that was about when we had it with cabbage soup. We made it four whole days eating it every meal and then some. I don’t even remember whether we lost any weight from our experiment.

Several years went by, and we thought we’d give the Cabbage Soup Diet one more try. The results were the same as the first time. Our conclusion was it is a great soup for your digestive system, it probably gave your health a bit of a boost, and you have to have a really strong willpower to make it seven days on the same food. Neither time did we make to seven days, and neither time did we lost the ten pounds. We also grew very tired of cabbage.

So, in our humble opinion, let’s keep cabbage to all the other recipes where it’s nice and tasty. We don’t need soup that promotes flatulence and frequent bathroom trips. H. L. Mencken observed, “That an idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than cabbage, concludes that it would also make better soup.” Well, I’m not too sure. Are you a cabbage lover in your soup? Do you have any other cabbage recipes that you enjoy? Would you try the Cabbage Soup diet? Until then…..have a warm and wonderful Wednesday, be safe, and I love you!