Soup

I love soup. It's always been one of my favorite things to cook and to eat. One of my favorite parts of winter is that I can really enjoy a hot bowl of soup.

Luckily, soup can also be a really good way of keeping calorie intake low. It turns out that if you eat a cup of broth-based soup before your meal, you'll eat about 20% fewer calories overall. The key is to have your appetizer soup be low-calorie. The benefits are lost if the soup is a calorie-heavy cream-based soup. This is great news for all of us, even if you prefer a creamy soup. If that's you, just make sure to include some potato in the recipe and puree the soup before serving. That will give you the look and feel of creamy soup without the calories from actual cream.

The reasons soup works to cut calorie consumption is because it is high in water and fiber which fill you up. Soup also forces you to eat it slowly, allowing your body to react to the food you've consumed. That's the opposite of french fries, which most people tend to eat so quickly that they're all gone before you know it.

This recipe contains the same ingredients from the study and is just combine, cook, blend and eat. You could just as easily skip the blending step if you prefer. I have a rutabaga, carrot, scallion, garlic and zucchini soup cooking for lunch. You don't need to follow a specific recipe for this. Just get some of your favorite high-fiber vegetables, add them to some low-fat broth and cook. You can find out the actual calories on line, but a serving of a cup will probably work out to about 100 calories. This is also a great way to use those vegetables in the fridge before they spoil on you. It's ok if they're not crisp anymore, because you're just going to cook them down anyway.