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Here's Why the Soup Cleanse Is About to Replace Juicing

Thinking about juicing? Nutrient rich soups are here to stop the suffering
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Juice cleansing -- drinking a selection of juices daily instead of eating food, or heaven help us all, the Master Cleanse -- has been on the radar for over ten years.

While it's been around since the '70s, many of us first heard about them when Beyonce famously used the Master Cleanse (also known as the Lemonade Diet) to drop weight quickly for her role in "Dreamgirls."

And, if you walk into any pharmacy, health food or vitamin store, you'll find shelves of powders and potions dedicated to cleansing diets. And of course, there's a bevy of juice delivery services like the Blue Print Cleanse.

However, the idea of not actually eating for several days is crazy intimidating, and now there is a new option: Soup. Yes, the ultimate comfort food is now being used as a gentle, nourishing cleanse. And, since soups rely primarily on vegetables, instead of fruit, it's super low on glycemic scale and packed with fiber. But does that mean you'll actually feel full -- or lose weight? I tried a soup cleanse for a week to find out. Here's how it all went down.



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My Soup Cleanse Plan
I decided to go with Splendid Spoon, a Brooklyn based company, which offers a mix of cleansing styles that you can customize. The basic weeklong cleanse includes six days with one of their smoothies for breakfast, a vegan soup for lunch and your normal dinner. The seventh day is a reset day of all "souping." Because I like a challenge, I decided to kick off my cleanse with the full day of souping. Everything else after that, I reasoned, would be a cakewalk. I had four bottles of "plant based drinkables" -- cauliflower coconut, celery plant, fennel consomme, and butternut turmeric -- and a bowl of black-eyed pea succotash. The company says you can have the drinkables cold or warm them up. I tried a small sip of one cold, and warmed the rest up over the course of the day. If you're regularly eating raw you might like these cold, but I'm still on team prefer-my-veggies-warm.

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How the First Day Went
I started my day with the cauliflower coconut soup, as I'm more of a sweet breakfast person (my usual go-to is a yogurt) and it was definitely ... different. In the pro-column, it was warm and supercomforting, but in the minus-column it did feel strange to have cauliflower soup at 9am. Splendid Spoon's head of special projects, Alex Hagney explained they are looking to address this by adding more smoothies to the mix, saying, "Smoothies are something we're working on."

I spaced the gluten-free drinkable soups out over the day and had the next at 11am, then 1:30pm and the last at 4pm. My favorite by far was the butternut turmeric, which was packed with the disease-fighting herb popular in many curries, giving the soup a rich, hearty flavor. For dinner I had the black-eyed pea succotash, which had more whole veggies than the drinkables, as well as a healthy serving of beans.

I definitely finished the day a fan. I didn't feel any hunger pangs, nor did I feel like all I ate all day was salad and raw greens. The textures and multi-layer flavors made the soup cleanse interesting for the palate, and not like a day of deprivation.



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A Week of Souping
After kicking off with the day of souping, swapping out my regular work-at-home breakfast and lunch of whatever random nosh is in the fridge with soup was an easy change to make -- and the best healthy changes are always the easy ones, right? It gave me that same great feeling I have when I eat a salad without dairy or croutons every day for a week -- I felt light and refreshed -- without having to eat a salad without dairy or croutons. And I wasn't hungry.

Bonus, by the end of the week, I dropped four pounds and my gut health was the best it has been in a month (yay!)



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How Much Is a Soup Cleanse?
While Splendid Spoon is 100 percent plant based, other soup cleanses, like Soupure, offer a combination of veggie soups and bone broths. Another great option is the vegan soup cleanse Soupelina, which delivers in LA, but also offers a cookbook with customizable three- and five-day cleanses.

For the Splendid Spoon cleanse, a full week of 15 meals (that's breakfast and lunch for five days, plus the four drinkables and one soup day), you'll have to fork over $135 plus taxes. That works out to $9 a meal by their math, but they are counting all five drinks on the full cleanse day as a meal. If you normally just eat three meals, it comes out to about $11 a meal. And remember, you're on your own for dinner -- which isn't always a bad thing. If you're looking to save money, these prices can seem a bit high, but if you want an easy cleanse that won't leave you starving, it's worth considering. The company also offers a cookbook, which likely brings costs down.

For comparison, a Soupure cleanse of 24 drinkable soups, goes for $270 delivered.

Splendid Spoon was founded with the goal of "making getting healthy easy, as we're all so busy," Hannah Hoskins, Community & Content Manager, explained to Total Beauty. It's for people who "want to lose weight or reset eating habits."

Getting healthy with ease and not feeling hungry? Sign me up for more soups.



BY TANYA EDWARDS | JUL 11, 2017 | SHARES
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