After taking advice from a doctor to be sure you are fit enough, you could pick out any short term diet such as the cabbage soup diet, the grapefruit diet or even a juice fast. Some of them cost more than others (especially those that require you to live on packaged diet products). However, provided you are healthy and have enough motivation you can restrict your calories enough to achieve a good weight loss over a short time.

The problem is that most of us do not have enough motivation. In fact, that is often why people become overweight in the beginning. Our culture, which conditions us to expect to get exactly what we want the moment we want it, seduces us into stuffing another bagel into our mouths for instant gratification even when we are not hungry.

At the same time, most of the food in the standard American diet is nutritionally poor. It is loaded with refined sugars and flours that give us calories with little or no minerals or vitamins. Many people drink alcohol which is the same – high calories, virtually no nutritional content.

This means that our bodies go on clamoring for more food even while we gorge on the most fattening things we can find. We tend to assume that if we eat like everyone else or more, we will have enough vitamins and minerals in our diet, but this is not true. You may be surprised to know that even if you eat a lot, you are unlikely to come close to achieving the RDA of most minerals unless you are eating large quantities of vegetables.

Another problem with most of the quick ways to lose weight is that they restrict the food intake even further. This means that at the end of whatever period you have set aside for your diet, you will almost certainly pack on the pounds again – unless you plan your diet very carefully.

This is one reason why the cabbage soup diet is not as stupid as you might think. Cabbage is a very nutritious food along with its family members broccoli and cauliflower. Eat plenty of those plus lots of fresh fruit, completely cut out sugar and anything made with flour, and you have the basics of a good weight loss diet that will not only help you lose weight fast right now, but may help you to keep it off.

So the best of all of the quick ways to lose weight is one that has you eat a lot of fresh, raw vegetables and fruit.

Even though the Mayo Clinic says they do not endorse or have anything to do with it, the cabbage soup diet is often attributed to them. If you have a major hospital in your area, you may have heard of it by that name. For instance, Loma Linda University is a major teaching hospital in one area and people in the vicinity call it the Loma Linda Diet.

In this Cabbage Soup Diet Review, I’m going to tell you what I like about this diet and what I think it is missing. It is a good diet in some limited circumstances, but if you are looking for long term weight loss management, it’s probably not the right diet for you.

There are a couple factors that make this diet program so attractive. The first is that if you stick to the plan, you will lose weight – up to 10 pounds in just one week. The other plus is that you won’t have to be hungry at all. That is because you get to eat as much of the soup as you want. You probably get sick of eating this soup, but you are not going to starve.

The downsides of the program are also two-fold. The first is that the diet is boring and many people find the food bland. You are only allowed certain foods on certain days. For example, on one day, all you can have besides the soup is bananas and skim milk. On the other hand, on another day you get up to 16 ounces of steak and all the vegetables you want.

The other problem with the diet is that it is extremely low in calories. That means that it is not sustainable over time. In fact, even people who endorse the cabbage soup diet recommend that you stay on the diet for one week and then wait at least one week before starting the cycle again.

You will average about 900 calories on the diet. This cabbage soup diet review notes that that’s not enough to keep your body going. Therefore, you will be forced to burn fat. That’s a good thing. But, if you stay on it for more than a week, your metabolism will start to shut down, reducing the fat-burining effects.

Also, the main weight loss from the cabbage soup diet comes from water loss.

To wrap it all up, my cabbage soup diet review points out that if you need to lose weight for an upcoming event, like a wedding, reunion, or just a big date, this may work out great for you. But if you are looking for a long term solution, this is not the program for you.

And that’s my cabbage soup diet review. See this post for a serious, long term weight loss system.