I’ve never been a “dieter.” As anyone has, I have cut things out of my diet like sugar or alcohol, but I’ve never followed a strict diet plan until, on a whim, I decided to spend a week doing The Cabbage Soup Diet.

It was Spring 2020, and after two months spent in isolation, not working, exercising, or socializing, nothing mattered. We whiled away the endless days with food and drink until they all melded into one continuous, meaningless blur. Day in, day out, we ate and drank seven days a week for two months until, by the end of May, our sloth and gluttony were showing in ways incontrovertible.

Denial is a powerful drug. It can persuade you that your scale is broken or that you’re only imagining that your belly used to be smaller. You might even convince yourself that you could never see your penis past your belly when you looked down. Still, when your pants, which required a belt to stay up just two months earlier, will no longer stretch around your fat belly and close, you cannot deny the problem before you without damaging the fabric of your mind and drifting towards insanity.

That was my moment of clarity, my rock bottom. I had no pants that fit, and I don’t mean they were a little tight on me; I mean, I could not button them. Any of them. No amount of sucking in my gut or tossing myself on the bed for leverage could get my pants to close. I even had Bonnie sit on my belly like a suitcase, but nothing could reduce the distance between button and hole. Little did it matter while we were stuck at home, but with the stay-at-home order soon to be lifted, I might actually have to reenter civilization. Something had to be done.

How I Ended Up On The Cabbage Soup Diet

YouTube could sense that I was in trouble. My feed became an endless stream of weight loss videos. One video, in particular, caught my eye because it claimed, incredibly, that I could lose fifteen pounds in seven days. I know nothing about weight loss, but that seemed like an impossible and totally unreasonable claim that needed debunking, and who better to put it to the test than a newly minted middle-aged fat guy? Besides, there wasn’t anything else to do.

I told Bonnie my plan, and she decided she wanted to join me on the cabbage soup diet, not that she was invited, mind you. I was perfectly content to do the diet on my own, but having a partner in misery might enrich the whole experience, so I didn’t put up a fight. Resolute in our endeavor to shed 30 pounds between us, I copied the shopping list from the video description, and then we hopped on our bikes and rode to the grocery store. 

There was no way to know just then that I was about to unleash a week of torture upon myself, which was for the best. At that moment, I was in the mood to try something new, and I was excited about this diet. The following day, we woke up and started the cabbage soup diet.

The novelty wore off before the weekend was out.

Starting the diet on a Friday guaranteed to ruin an otherwise perfectly good weekend, Memorial Day weekend, at that. Not that there was any sort of delineation between the week and the weekend at this point, but forty years of indoctrination into the rat race doesn’t fade away in just two months. Weekends still brought with them a reprieve, but now, instead of being a reprieve from work, they were a reprieve from the guilt and shame of the day drinking that was starting increasingly earlier with every passing day. It hadn’t yet crept into the morning hours, but it was getting dangerously close. 

We were going to lose a weekend to this awful diet no matter what day we started it, but starting on a Friday meant that the diet would be over in time to fully enjoy the following weekend and all that it entails. That we were already thinking about our future gluttonous exploits before the diet even began did not bode well for the efficacy of this diet and showed that we were not fully committed to our health. For the moment, however, we were fully committed to this diet, if for no other reason than to prove to the other that we could finish.

Let The Diet Begin!

It’s hard to say which day was the hardest – actually, it’s not. It was Day 6. Day 6 was the hardest. The first day would be high in the running for the second hardest, though. On the first day, we could only eat fruit in addition to the cabbage soup. We spent half of the first day making the cabbage soup, though, so it wasn’t available to eat until sometime in the early afternoon.

All I had to eat until the soup was ready were apples and bananas. It may not sound like a great tribulation, but you have to remember that not 24 hours before, there was no restriction to my daily caloric intake. None. Now, all I could eat was fruit that didn’t satisfy or fill me up the way carbs and sugar did. I would have to summon some serious willpower if I was going to get through this diet. Fortunately, I had a superpower: experience.

As I said, I’ve cut things out of my diet before. In 2016, I quit drinking alcohol and reduced my sugar intake to less than 25 grams per day, so what I was feeling wasn’t a total surprise. Bonnie and I also quit all carbs just a few weeks before the COVID lockdown started, so I knew it would take some time for the cravings to stop. In my experience, it takes three full days of abstinence from sugar before the jonesing stops.

This time around, it was different, though. Not only was I abstaining from all refined sugar and other carbs, but also alcohol and meat. It only took a day to figure out that all those things were what I used to cope with stress and anxiety. I found myself stuck in a loop. Detoxing from the garbage I was used to eating made me anxious, which made me want to eat garbage to cope with the anxiety caused by detoxing from the garbage. I was suddenly and acutely aware that I had a toxic relationship with food, which went undetected for decades because I was active enough to stave off any adverse effects caused by over-eating.

The cabbage soup diet illuminated how I have been using food as a coping mechanism since I was a teenager, and I didn’t even know it. It was like stopping for the night in an unfamiliar place. When you wake up in the morning and look outside, the landscape is revealed. It was as though I were seeing myself for the first time.

I’ve Been Here Before

The crazy, stupid thing is, I’ve been here before. When I cut out sugar and alcohol back in 2016, I felt better than I ever had. It was easy to see the connection between what I ate and how I felt. The hard part was all of the triggers. We would go on bike rides that always ended up at 7-Eleven. We would get a treat and ride back home. Going for the ride but not getting the treat was hard, especially when everyone else was getting a treat. At least there were other comfort foods that I could eat and other things to do to distract me.

The cabbage soup diet was different. There were no distractions. I gave up all the food I used for comfort, which caused me more stress and no comfort. My cravings for wine, cookies, and pizza were unlike anything I’d ever experienced. On top of everything else, we were in the middle of a global lockdown, so there was nowhere to go; there was nothing to do except stay at home and confront my demons. So, confront them, I did.

I don’t think this diet would have been as productive for me if Bonnie hadn’t joined me in misery. Every morning during the cabbage soup diet, we would sit out back, choke down our cabbage soup, and talk. We talked a lot about food and our relationships with it both now and when we were younger. Talking about my relationship with food when I was younger helped me see patterns I was blind to for so long, and that is essential for making lasting changes.

Day 2 was frustrating. On Day 1, we were only allowed to eat fruit in addition to the cabbage soup. On Day 2, though, we were only allowed to eat vegetables with the cabbage soup. All I wanted to eat on Day 2 was fruit. I can’t be sure why, but I suspect that after more than 24 hours without copious amounts of sugar, my body was withdrawing, and since the fruit was the closest thing to sugar that I was going to get for the next week, nothing sounded better than a banana on Day 2. 

Day 3 might have been the easiest day. I was acclimating to the diet, and we could eat fruits and vegetables. Day 3 was when I started to come to my senses about my health. I realized that I would rather change my relationship with food than do stupid diets like this cabbage soup diet.

I’ve seen the cycle of dieting secondhand, but I’ve never seen a perpetual dieter ever get any smaller. Bonnie’s mom is a perpetual dieter. She spent the better part of three decades doing the Atkins diet. It was really just an excuse to eat as much meat as she wanted without having to eat any vegetables. Once, when she was about seven, Bonnie asked her mom for apples while grocery shopping. Her mom said, “No, I can’t have apples on my diet.” There’s a whole lot to unpack in that sentence, but that’s for another story.

In the 25 years I’ve known her, I’ve never known her not to be “trying” to lose weight. I use “trying” loosely because she diets the way one might watch TV or crochet. It’s an activity to fill time during the day, not an endeavor with a plan, a benchmark, and a goal. Even at 82 and with dementia well settled in, she’s still obsessed with her weight.

A while back, she gave up gluten for ten days because she decided that she must be allergic to it. She stopped eating bread and rice. Yes, rice. After ten days, she was down two dress sizes. A remarkable feat, considering she spent a whole week of her gluten-free diet eating banana bread my son made. Clearly, she has no idea what gluten is – or what a diet is, come to that. There was always room on her Atkins diet for bear claws, pastries, or just a ball of butter rolled in sugar.

Having had a front-row seat to this one-woman show of self-delusion and self-destruction, it only took two days to decide that dieting was not for me. I would rather take care of myself continuously than try to catch up in fits and starts. That was the conclusion I came to on day three, and I could very well have ended the diet there and come away a little smarter and a little better for my effort, but something much bigger and more important was awaiting me at the end of the diet. Information that would literally change my life was just days away. 

Day 4 was the strangest part of the diet. In addition to the soup, we were to eat eight bananas and drink eight glasses of skim milk. Before the diet even started, I told Bonnie there was nothing in this world that could get me to drink the milk. I’ve never liked milk. It’s repellent in every way: the taste, the smell, the origin. There was no way I was drinking a drop of milk, let alone a half gallon.

Bonnie insisted that we replace those calories, though. Her solution was to substitute the milk with a plant-based protein shake. In her mind, that was a better alternative to milk. She made me try the shake that she made the morning of day four. She was wrong. The shake was just as disgusting as milk. I ate my eight bananas and cabbage soup, and Bonnie made me eat a salad to make up some calories, but not a drop of milk passed my lips that day. Bonnie discovered, after about four bananas, that she was allergic to them. Her tongue swelled, and the roof of her mouth was itchy. Who knew a stupid diet made to help people who are too fat for heart surgery drop weight quickly could reveal so many things about ourselves?

Nothing Like A Cabbage Soup High

I woke up on day 5 of The Cabbage Soup Diet, and I felt better than I have ever felt in my entire life. I was alert, energetic, and happy. I’ve never been a morning person, but I woke up that day at 5:45 a.m. and practically leaped out of bed. It doesn’t matter what time I get up or how much sleep I get; I’ve never leaped out of bed before. I didn’t know it was possible to feel so good. Did other people wake up feeling like this? Do those naturally perky people who drive you nuts in the morning feel like this every day? 

The feeling stayed with me all day and into the next. I woke up on Day 6 feeling just as good, maybe even better than I had the day before. I have no doubt it would have carried over into the final day of the diet, except that I got a little overzealous and made myself sick.

We went grocery shopping for food to eat when the diet was over. Grocery shopping on bikes is nothing new for us; we’ve been doing it for years. It was a beautiful, warm, 85º Spring day. The perfect day for a ride. Perfect, that is, for someone who has not been highly restricting calories for a week. When we got home from our 16-mile ride, my legs were jelly. I was shaking all over, and I felt awful. All I wanted to do was to lie down and try not to throw up. I drank a Gatorade – pounded it, actually, and then I sat down to rest.

I wasn’t down very long, though, before the Gatorade returned. My Cabbage Soup high was gone, and it would not return. To this day, I still have never felt as good as I did on days 5 and 6 of the diet, though it’s not for lack of trying. Chasing that feeling in December 2021, I ate nine bananas in one day, hoping to feel that way again the next day.

What I found super interesting was that after banana four, I had this massive energy surge, like when Doc threw his homemade Presto Logs into the fire, and the engine lurched forward. After about an hour, I expected to crash, but the crash never came. I just continued to feel fantastic. This was the answer I was looking for! Perhaps, but we’ll never know. The next day, I woke up feeling awful. I was coming down with something. Bad luck, bad timing. 

Thursday morning, I woke up feeling normal, which was a bummer. It was like I had a superpower the previous two days, and now it was gone. Feeling normal again felt worse than usual. I’ve felt like shit for as long as I can remember, at least since I was 12. I’ve never had any energy, I’m always racked with anxiety, and I’ve never understood why nobody else seemed to feel the way I did. Then, I got a taste of what feeling good feels like – it tastes like banana – and I wanted it back. I did have a consolation, however. It was the last day of this godforsaken diet.

This Stupid Cabbage Soup Diet is Finally Over!

On Friday morning, we weighed ourselves. I don’t think either of us was surprised to learn that we didn’t reach our goal of fifteen pounds each. Bonnie lost less than eight pounds, and I lost nine and a half.

Pre-diet life resumed immediately after the weigh-in, and I’m ashamed at how quickly I fell back into my old routine. It only lasted three days, however. By Sunday, I was feeling like my old self again, which wasn’t a good thing. I wanted to feel good again, at least how I felt at the end of the diet, if not how I felt on Day 5. I began to connect the dots. After a week of eating copious vegetables and fruits, no sugar or bread, and very little meat, I felt great! After three days of eating bread, sugar, and meat, I felt sluggish and gross.

Then it hit me. I can’t process gluten! I immediately cut gluten out of my diet and instantly began to feel better. Not eight bananas a day better, but better than I had in a long, long time. I had energy, I could think clearly, and my skin cleared up. It was like the opposite of a miracle pill. Abstinence was my miracle pill. After a lifetime of feeling awful, I finally knew why. It was a tricky road to navigate at first, and I accidentally glutenized myself several times during the first five months of my new gluten-free diet. I knew gluten came from wheat, but I didn’t realize that barley and rye also contain gluten, so I wasn’t looking for those ingredients when reading the labels on food packaging. I also learned the hard way about cross-contamination at restaurants, but things have gotten much easier. 

It’s been three years since the cabbage soup diet, and I am happy to say that we’re still on track. I haven’t glutenized myself in almost a year, and although I did gain back more than twice the weight I lost after the diet, I have since lost 40 pounds just by making better choices. I’m only eating two meals a day, I limit my sugar intake, and I quit drinking. I feel better than I have in years, and I’m more focused and productive than ever.

You Never See The Change A-Comin’

I could never have imagined, at the start of 2020, how radically different my life would be 12 months later, let alone three years, but here we are. I feel like I have taken the first big step out of a rut and am back on flat, solid ground again. We’re not complacent, though. Health takes work to maintain, and we’re ready for it.

For the first time in many, many years, I am optimistic for the future.

We documented the week of our cabbage soup diet experience, and you can watch it here: