Get slim with soup!

Delicious Fish Noodle Soup, perfect to bust the Winter chill!

When the weather turns cold and chilly winds blow, it’s hard to eat light and feel enthusiastic about salad or fresh fruit – soup, packed with lots of vegetables, is the answer.

Soup is the dieter’s best friend. It has what nutritionists call a low-kilojoule density. It’s high in water and fibre, but low in fat and carbohydrates, so you can fill up without taking in too many kilojoules.

RECIPE: Vegetable Bean Soup
DIET: Try this hunger-busting diet for Winter!

Soup is often used as a meal replacement in diets such as the Kickstart Soup Diet or the Cabbage Soup Diet. You cook up a big pot of a low-fat vegetable soup and eat it to replace one or two meals a day and any time you’re feeling hungry. While these fad diets are not balanced nor sustainable long-term, they illustrate how useful soup is for weight loss.

Dr Barbara Rolls, Professor of Nutrition at Pennsylvania State University in the US, reports that dieters who ate soup as their first course in a meal consumed on average 400 fewer kilojoules in that meal compared to those who didn’t start with soup.

So make up a big pot today – it’s a great healthy snack.

Healthy tips

• If you prefer, replace salt-reduced chicken stock with salt-reduced vegetable stock.

• Use our vegetable soup as a between-meal snack and hunger buster. Make up a batch, freeze half for later, keep the second half covered in the fridge. Pour out a generous mugful and heat in the microwave whenever you get hungry. With little fat and heaps of fibre, it adds over three serves of vegetables to your day easily and deliciously.