Water and Weight Loss

Water and Weight Loss - Diet Tip #1

It is recommended that you should drink eight, 8oz. glasses of water every day for successful weight loss. This works out to be half a gallon, or almost 2 liters, of water.

Why drink water to lose weight?

• Drinking a big glass of water whenever you feel hungry and before a meal or snack fills the stomach briefly and makes you feel fuller and stop eating sooner.

• Breaking down body fat and body muscle during weight loss produces wastes that must be eliminated through the kidneys. Drinking enough water is important to keep the kidneys functioning to remove these wastes.

• Popular high-protein diets produce more waste products from digestion, let alone from breaking down stored fat.

• Kidney function is even more important when on a high-protein diet.

• Drinking more water does not "flush fat."

• If the dieter is drinking plain water, he/she is less likely to be drinking something with calories in it.

If you want an added benefit from water, drink cold water. Doing this will make your body have to work a bit to warm up the water and will burn a few extra calories.

Drinking Water and Your Metabolism

Drinking 500 mL of water (a half-liter or about a pint) increased the study participants’ metabolism briefly - for about a half hour. In that time they burned an extra 25 calories. That’s about a quarter of a piece of sliced bread, or 5 M&Ms. The researchers theorized that most of the effect comes from warming the water in the stomach. In the male participants the calories came mostly from stored fat, in the women it came from stored carbohydrates. The paper was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, December, 2003. It was conducted by researchers in Berlin.