I’m seriously ticking along now with my weight loss and fitness progress. On Monday I gave you an update of my current stats after having dropped 4 pounds and 4.5 inches over the past week, and there’s something that I’d like to share with you that has really been helping me.

As you know, I am a huge fan of the Six Week Body Makeover, my healthy eating and exercise plan of choice. Why? Well, there are numerous reasons, but the main one is that it teaches you how to live a healthy lifestyle. You aren’t given packaged diet foods but instead you learn to buy healthy, whole foods and cook them in very tasty recipes. You have a large resource of on plan (free!) recipes online for the Six Week Body Makeover, and if you pick a recipe that you’re not sure of, just make a smaller portion to try it out. When you find something you love (I have many favorites), then you will build up a list of tried and true recipes to choose from.

The thing is, one of the benefits of eating clean, whole, healthy foods is that your metabolism gets revved up and burns like a coal furnace. This helps you shed fat by also using portion control and eating small meals throughout the day (every 2.5 – 3 hours). Actually, this is the same way that body builders eat; you can find the suggestion to eat small meals throughout the day on the side panel of many protein powder containers.

Now, do you know what happens when your metabolism starts burning hotter and hotter and your body is using the clean food that you’re feeding it for fuel? You get hungry! Yes, it’s true, you do feel hungry. It’s expected that you will be hungry when it’s time to eat again, however there are just some days for me that it seems like I am always hungry, even after I eat.

I’m not one of those people who feels like there is too much food to fit into one day (there are people who have said this), and maybe part of this is because of my issue with (mistakenly) thinking that I’m not getting enough because I’m not stuffing myself and overeating. Either way, I just feel hungry more often on some days. Yes, it’s good because whenever this happens I do lose weight since my metabolism is running like an engine, but I’m not into feeling hungry. In the past I have used this hunger as an excuse to eat things that aren’t on my plan, which only serves to sabotage my weight loss efforts!

Since I am on a roll with my motivation and my commitment, I want to be proactive and pull out all the stops. This means that I needed to do something that I hadn’t done before: try out an on plan soup recipe! Something that is great about the Six Week Body Makeover are foods called “free foods”. These are veggies (tomatoes and cabbage are 2 of them) that you can eat as much of as you want as long as it’s with a meal (there is no eating between meals). I’d never made a 6WBMO soup recipe before but I found one for cabbage soup that had gotten good reviews and sounded good to me. Turns out that I love it, and I eat it with several of my meals each day.

I don’t want to confuse anyone so I must clarify that this is not the infamous “cabbage soup diet”. I eat very healthy, balanced meals and am not eating only cabbage soup. Sometimes I add my protein and/or carb to the soup, and sometimes I just have it on the side. There are also some other 6WBMO soup recipes that I plan to make to see how they turn out so that I don’t get bored with the cabbage soup.

All I did here was solve the problem (sometimes feeling hungry soon after eating) with an on plan solution (adding in more free foods) so that I didn’t have any excuse for not following the plan. I am committed to getting this weight off and increasing my muscle strength and I feel awesome eating clean and healthy. It’s just that there were times in the past when I would run with that feeling of hunger and use it as an excuse to eat something that was not on plan, therefore sabotage my weight loss progress.

If you are following the Six Week Body Makeover, I highly suggest that you take full advantage of the free, online recipe exchange. It’s not realistic to make a lifestyle out of eating the same food every day for each of your meals (that would feel like a diet to me!), and there are so many recipes to choose from that there’s just no way you can get bored. Besides that, if you want to add in some free foods with your meals, you can find many “free veggie” recipes in the exchange.

If you try the cabbage soup, let me know how you like it!