There is
a potion that magically strips away pounds from your body, improves
your overall health, lengthens your life, makes you more attractive to
the opposite sex, and keeps you lean forever. Even better, you can have
as much of this magic weight-loss potion as you want, for free, and
start stripping away pounds—perhaps even several dozen pounds this year
alone—without exercise, without dieting, without visiting the set of
Nip/Tuck.
What is this magical elixir? It’s water.
Really? Really. You don't even need to mix in that fancy fat-burning
stuff from the vitamin store. In fact, the less you supplement your
food and beverage intake, the more weight you’ll lose (and the more
money you’ll save). Keep reading this five-point plan from the new
book Drink This,
Not That! and begin
your no diet weight-loss goals today. You'll sip your way to a flat
belly in record time--and keep it well beyond summer.
Step 1: Swear Off the Soda
and Iced Tea
(Annual Weight Loss: 18 Pounds!)
The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey measured where
most of our calories come from. Researchers broke up America’s food
intake into 143 different categories and discovered, to their horror,
that the category making up the largest percentage of our calorie
intake—7.1 percent, to be exact—was not a food at all. It was soda.
(Vegetables, on the other hand, accounted for only 6.5 percent of our
intake. Chicken and fish together only added up to 5.7 percent.) To put
that into perspective, if you ate an average of 2,500 calories a day,
and you cut 7 percent of your calories, you’d automatically drop down
to 2,325, a difference that would save you 1.5 pounds per month. You
could be 9 pounds lighter in 6 months by going cold-turkey today!
Another thing to remember: You're far better off eating your vitamins
than drinking them. Here are 40
foods with scientifically proven superpowers.
Step 2: Drink 8 Cups of Water
Every Day
(Annual Weight Loss: 26 Pounds!)
Yes, the magic elixir really does have amazing powers. In one study, a
group of 173 overweight women were put through diet and nutrition
training using mainstream diet programs. Researchers then followed them
for 10 months, with dietary and body composition being recorded up to
12 months after the classes. All women in the program lost weight, but
those drinking more water lost more weight. Drinking more than 1 liter
of water per day (nearly 4½ cups) was associated with an extra
5.07 pounds lost in 12 months.
And researchers from the University of Utah found that people who drink
the most water have higher metabolisms. In a study, subjects drank 4,
8, or 12 cups of water each day. Those who drank at least 8 cups
reported better concentration and higher energy levels, and tests
showed that they were burning more calories than the 4-cups-a-day group.
Of course, if you're looking to lose weight, diet is only half the
equation. For the other half, check out our list of the 100 best
fitness tips ever written. Your best beach body awaits!
Step 3: Enjoy One, Two, or
Even Three Yogurt-Based Smoothies a Day
(Annual Weight Loss: 10 Pounds!)
I love the sound of a cranking blender. But a combination of ice,
dairy, and fruit does more than just make a teeth-rattling cacophony in
your kitchen. It also helps strip pounds from your body.
There are three simple reasons why: Smoothies take little time to make
(so you can quash your hunger pangs quickly), they’re packed with
nutrition (especially if you start with Greek yogurt and add berries,
whey protein, and some flax), and their thickness takes up a lot of
space in your stomach, crowding out the Doritos. In fact, researchers
at Purdue University found that people stayed fuller longer when they
drank thick drinks than when they drank thin ones, and a study at Penn
State found that people who drank yogurt shakes that had been blended
until they doubled in volume ate 96 fewer calories a day than those
consuming thinner drinks.
And
speaking of deceptively unhealthy foods, check our must-know roundup of 30
“Health” Foods That Aren’t. You'll be shocked to learn how
smoothies, salads and veggie wraps--among other seemingly healthful
fare--might be sabotaging your weight-loss goals thanks to deceptive
marketing practices.
Step 4: Avoid Juice Drinks
(Annual Weight Loss: 19 Pounds!)
Imagine a world in which we called products what they really were:
Hungry Man Dinners would be called Lonely Man Dinners. ESPN would be
called the Fat Nerds Yap about Jocks Channel. And SunnyD would be
called Obesi-D because there’s nothing sunny about a drink marketed to
kids that looks and tastes like juice, but is 95 percent water and corn
syrup.
While even 100 percent juice has its problems, juice drinks and their
ilk are the worse offenders. One 16-ounce bottle of SunnyD Smooth packs
a whopping 180 straight-up empty calories and 40 grams of sugar. If you
drink one a day, cut it out. You’ll lose 19 pounds in a year!
And SunnyD is just the beginning. See the worst
beverages in the supermarket for
a
complete list of jaw-dropping drinks--and their healthier
alternatives.
Step 5: Drink Coffee, Not
Coffee Drinks
(Annual Weight Loss: 18 Pounds!)
Researchers studied coffee habits in New York and found that two-thirds
of Starbucks’ customers opted for blended coffee drinks over regular
brewed coffee or tea. The average caloric impact of the blended drinks
was 239 calories. The regular coffee or tea, by comparison, was only 63
calories after factoring in added cream and sugar. So even if you like
your coffee sweet and light, you can strip away 176 calories every day,
just by making this one swap.
Now, budding mathematicians among you may notice that all this adds up
to a whopping 91 pounds lost in a single year. This is not good news if
you weigh 125. (However, travel just got a lot cheaper because now you
can mail yourself all over the world.) Fact is, unless you're currently
engaging in all of the bad habits above, you probably don't have 91
pounds to lose.
But this
five-point plan illustrates how extraordinarily easy it is to shed
extra weight—a lot of weight—just by watching what we drink. And that,
my friends, is something worth raising a glass to.
And
while I'm on the subject, here are 10 more
simple weight loss secrets. Read them now and start melting pounds
by tonight.
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