Have you heard the adage don’t drink your calories? Good advice actually. If you want to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, watching what you drink is a good starting point. Maintaining a healthy weight for most people is really just tweaking a few things in your diet, and cutting out a drink here or there will hardly be noticeable after a few weeks of practice.
Let’s look at some examples of beverages and their caloric intake over the course of a year:
Beer – Do you enjoy a 6 pack during the week? 135 calories (average) X 6 X 52 weeks = 42,120 calories or 12 pounds per year.
Wine – Do you savor an 8-ounce class of wine 5 days a week? 200 Calories X 5 Days X 52 Weeks or 52,000 Calories or 14.85 lbs per year.
Soft drink – 1 can per day? 140 calories X 365 days = 51,110 calories or 14.6 lbs per year
Juice – Pour an 8-ounce glass of unsweetened orange juice every morning? 105 calories X 365 days = 38,325 calories or 10.95 pounds per year
Coffee: Are you like all those other teary-eyed customers waiting in line for their daily dose of Tim Horton’s half-double/double coffee in the morning? 210 calories X 365 days = 76,650 calories or 21.9 lbs. You’re much better off having a can of soda at 6:30am, at least you only gained 14lbs.
Now, do you understand why watching what you drink can make all the difference in the world as to whether or not you are successful at weight maintenance? It really is that simple. People suffer from following these crazy starvation diets. They lose weight, but eventually find themselves back to the same weight and don’t want to go back to the drudgery and pain of dieting again. Who could? If it’s as easy as cutting out one drink a day, why wouldn’t you consider it? Let’s say you’ve been putting on 8 pounds a year for the last 5 years and have gained 40 pounds. This might sound like you’ve become the world’s biggest glutton, right? Not really. It means that you consumed only 77 extra calories above your daily limit per day. Half a beer, 3 ounces of wine, half a can of soda a day. Little bit. Let’s take the soda can as an example. If you gain 8 pounds a year and now cut out that one can of soda a day, you’ll lose 6.6 pounds in a year doing nothing more than that. Yeah, it sounds simplistic, I know, but you can’t really argue with the math.
As a trainer, I see how not drinking your calories works every time. We had a 12 week weight loss contest in our studio a couple of years ago. We would publish the results every week in terms of percentage of weight loss. Four weeks into the contest, one of our clients was falling behind at the bottom of the contest. She hadn’t really bought into our pep talk about weight loss strategies, but she decided to do just one thing; stop drinking beer for the duration of the contest. At the end of the 12 weeks, she had gone from second to last out of 25 participants to finishing second out of 22 people! Most of the people I train who drink alcohol have amazing weight loss results if they can quit for a specific period or at least reduce it in the long run.
Let’s change the subject and start with diet soda. If you’re a soda drinker and don’t mind the taste of diet soda, you’re probably thinking I’ll just make the switch. But this is where it starts to get complicated. Most of us are aware that sugar substitutes are not very healthy. After all, didn’t they prove that if a mouse drinks the equivalent of 100 diet sodas a day, it will develop cancer in 40 years or something like that? I used to tell my clients if they wanted something sweet after dinner to eat those 5 calorie sucralose sweetened jellies. I would eat them too. If one wasn’t enough to satisfy my sweet tooth, I’d eat a second or third. Why not, it would only be 15 calories. Probably more calories burned getting up to go to the fridge good! However, after a while I stopped eating them, because after two or three I started to get dizzy. I didn’t know why, but that was enough to tell me that maybe eating something that made me dizzy wasn’t such a great idea. As you’ll see later in the article, a lot happened to my body after consuming those little packets of Jell-O.
With new research, it appears that diet soda or artificially sweetened products are not only unhealthy, but can also give you a pretty big belly. A new study just published found that people who drink diet soda accumulate three times more abdominal fat than those who don’t. Three times!! And I thought I was doing myself a favor at the movies just by drinking diet soda all these years. Should have had a Snapple with extra large buttered popcorn. It would have been better! The San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Aging (http://professional.diabetes.org/Abstracts_Display.aspx?CID=864889) spanned a period of nearly 10 years and followed 750 people.
Another 14-year study of 66,118 women published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2013/01/30/ajcn.112.050997) found the following:
1. Diet sodas increase the risk of diabetes more than sugary sodas!
2. Women who drank a 12-ounce diet soda had a 33% increased risk of type 2 diabetes, and women who drank a 20-ounce soda had a 66% increased risk.
3. Women who drank diet sodas drank twice as much as those who drank sugar-sweetened sodas because artificial sweeteners are more addictive and are hundreds to thousands of times sweeter than regular sugar.
4. The average diet soda drinker consumes three diet drinks a day.
The theory is that the sweetness of diet drinks tricks the body into thinking it’s ingesting sugar, triggering a release of insulin (fat storage hormone) that just loves to store that fat in your belly. In a related article by Dr. Mark Hyman, he also states that “[artificial sweeteners]also confuse and slow down your metabolism, so you burn fewer calories every day.” And if that’s not bad enough, he says, “It makes you hungry and you crave even more sugar and starchy carbohydrates like bread and pasta.”
What is that question I hear you ask? “What can I drink then?” “How about the water? Just kidding”!!! Though if you’re cutting out other drinks, you want to make sure you’re getting enough fluids in your day. If you like averages, men should drink about 13 8-ounce cups and women 9 cups per day.
Let’s go back to the types of drinks above and give you some new strategies.
Beer
• Cutting your consumption in half to three beers a week would save you 6 pounds a year.
• If it’s more of a social thing, consider light beers (excuse the non-Canadian) like Molson Canadian 67. You guessed it: 67 calories per beer. If you’re still drinking your 6-pack a week, it saves you £6 a year
Came
• There really isn’t a low-calorie substitute that I know of. Skinny Girl products have some press, but they only save you 10 calories per 5-ounce glass of wine. The best thing we can do with wine is to reduce consumption.
General alcohols
• If you cut down or cut out your alcohol intake, be prepared to start hunting for candy in the kitchen. Alcohol loads a lot of sugar into our body and when it is no longer delivered the body will start asking you to replace it. It will take about two weeks of willpower to overcome this initial sugar rush.
soda
• If you like bubbles, you can opt for a sparkling water without sugar that you can get at any grocery store.
• Whole Foods has many sugar-free sodas with no artificial sweeteners.
Juice
• If you are like me and can’t stand water at midnight or first thing in the morning. I mix 8 ounces of water with two ounces of unsweetened cranberry juice which is only 26 calories. It gives me some of the sugar my body wants in the morning with a fraction of the calories. I could never drink straight juice again now. I find it overwhelmingly sweet. Try diluting your favorite juice little by little over the next few weeks until you get the hang of it. Eventually, like me, I bet you’ll prefer it that way.
Coffee
First of all, let me tell you that I have not found a good sugar substitute for your coffee. And the cream is too calorie dense. The double cream in a Tim Horton medium double double coffee accounts for 150 of the 210 calories. Choose a 40-calorie double medium milk and you’ll have saved 90 calories or 9.38 pounds over the year if you drink one every day.
• At home you can go with almond milk. 2 ounces of unsweetened almond milk is only 8.6 calories. My wife loves this in her coffee or tea. I, on the other hand, find it disgusting. Try it and see for yourself.
• If you like creaminess, you can opt for unsweetened coconut milk. 2 ounces will give you only about 10 calories.
So let’s make a toast to not drinking our calories! However, toasting with that bottle of water doesn’t have the same sound as a nice crystal wine glass. Oh good.
http://www.runningyogitrainer.com
