So after a super foodie trip to Israel during which I ate my weight in hummus, pita, and babka (only to come back to NYC for Thanksgiving and about a month straight of non-stop cheat days), I thought, why not try something new and do a soup cleanse? You might be wondering, what the heck is a soup cleanse? Well, if you opt for leading brand The Splendid Spoon – think of them as the BluePrintCleanse of soup cleansing – you’ll get five soups delivered to your home that you’re meant to heat and eat in a day. It’s basically the winter juice cleanse. The soups I got were delicious and super low in calories. In total, they had about 700, which is probably how many calories are in one container of the cream of mushroom soup I usually buy at Citarella (but damn, it’s so good I don’t care!!!). Before I go any further, I’ll say I’m very anti-cleansing. I think our bodies are fine detoxing themselves, and I don’t think anyone should cut their diet down to 700 calories a day. That said, sometimes when you’re in a healthy eating rut, it’s hard to get out, and having healthy food delivered to your door is good motivation. My personal history tells me that if I can eat “clean” for three days straight, I’m back to being “on track,” at least for the next few weeks…the key is the motivation to make the switch from cookies and chips to fresh produce! That’s where, for me, this soup cleanse came in.
Again, I wish I could survive on 700 calories a day, but given that I work out for about an hour pretty much every day, that is not sustainable; so I used the cleanse as a kind of “cleanse till dinner” tool, and enjoyed them throughout the day, then I capped off with a light dinner (chicken salad and some fruit). $55 gets you five soups, enough for a day, which isn’t cheap, but it’s not a bad price given how “clean” these soups are. These aren’t the kind of soups that you can find at your local grocer. These are the kind of soups you’d have to have the patience to make on your own, which I don’t, and I also don’t have the creative know-how to come up with the brand’s unique combinations. Beet soup?? I’ve never had such a thing! And it was surprisingly super rich, as was the mushroom soup made with oatmeal, another favorite. Steal cut oats, it turns out, are a great filler both in terms of actually helping fill you up and adding texture to what would otherwise be a watery soup. Again, these are low-calorie so there is a lot of water in many of them. It is not easy to make flavorful soups that are under 200 calories! They don’t taste salty, but some of them are in the 20-something percentage range of sodium, so if you’re not using these as a cleanse, make sure the other foods you are eating are low in sodium. Every one of the soups I tried tasted fantastic, and some even had creamy texture (even though they were made without cream). Highly recommend these soups for anyone looking for a little dietary reboot!
