Have you heard the adage not to 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 adjusting 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 drinks and their caloric contributions during a year:
Beer: 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 taste 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 pounds per year.
Soda – 1 can per day? 140 calories X 365 days = 51,110 calories or 14.6 pounds per year
Juice: Do you 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 cloudy-eyed customers waiting in line for your morning fix of Tim Horton’s double / double medium coffee? 210 calories X 365 days = 76,650 calories or 21.9 pounds. Much better if you have a can of soda at 6:30 a.m. M. At least he only gained 14 pounds.
Now, do you understand why looking at what you drink can make the difference in the world to know if you are successful in weight maintenance or not? It really is that simple. People suffer from these crazy starvation diets. They lose weight, but eventually get back to the same weight and don’t want to go back to the monotony and pain of dieting. 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 gaining 8 pounds per year for the past 5 years and you’ve gained 40 pounds. This may seem like you’ve become the world’s biggest glutton, right? Not really. It means you consumed just an extra 77 calories over your daily limit per day. Half a beer, 3 ounces of wine, half a can of soda a day. Little. Take the soda can as an example. If you are gaining 8 pounds per year and now you eliminate that can of soda per day, you will lose 6.6 pounds in a year doing nothing more than that. Yes, it sounds simplistic, I know, but you can’t really argue with the math.
As a coach, I see how not drinking your calories works all the time. We had a 12 week weight loss contest in our studio a couple of years ago. We would post the results each week in terms of the percentage of weight loss. Four weeks after the contest started, one of our clients was lagging at the bottom of the contest. He hadn’t really accepted our talk about weight loss strategies, but he decided to do only one thing; stop drinking beer for the duration of the contest. By the end of the 12 weeks, he had gone from the penultimate of 25 participants to second place, and he surpassed 22 people! Most of the people I train who drink alcohol have surprising results in weight loss if they can eliminate it for a specific period or at least reduce it in the long term.
Let’s change the subject and start with diet sodas. If you’re a soda drinker and don’t care about the taste of diet sodas, you’re probably thinking I’ll just make the switch. But this is where it starts to get tricky. Most of us know that sugar substitutes are not very healthy. After all, didn’t they prove that if a mouse drinks the equivalent of 100 diet popsicles a day it will develop cancer in 40 years or something as absurd as that? I used to tell my clients if they wanted something sweet after dinner to eat those 5 calorie jellies sweetened with sucralose. I would eat them too. If one wasn’t enough to satisfy my sweet tooth, I’d eat a second or a third. Why not, it would only be 15 calories. Probably more calories are burned getting up to go to the right refrigerator! However, after a while I stopped eating them, because after two or three I was starting 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 good idea. As you will see later in the article, a lot happened to my body after consuming those little gelatin packets.
With new research, it appears that not only are diet sodas or artificially sweetened products unhealthy, but they can also give you a pretty big belly. A newly published study found that people who drink diet soda accumulate three times more belly fat than those who don’t. Three times !! And I thought he was doing me a favor at the movies 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 tracked 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 increased diabetes risk more than sugar-sweetened sodas!
2. Women who drank a 12-ounce diet soda had a 33 percent increased risk of type 2 diabetes, and women who drank a 20-ounce soda had a 66 percent 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 hundreds or 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 is ingesting sugar, causing a release of insulin (a fat-storing hormone) that loves to store that fat in the stomach. 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 hungrier and craves even more sugar and starchy carbs like bread and pasta.”
What is that question I hear you ask? “What can I drink then?” “How about the water? Just kidding” !!! Although if you are cutting out other beverages, you need to make sure you get enough fluids in your day. If you like averages, men should drink about 13 to 8 ounce cups and women 9 cups per day.
Let’s go back to the previous types of drinks and give you some new strategies.
Beer
• Cutting your consumption in half to three beers per week would save you 6 pounds per year.
• For something more social, consider light beers (apologize for non-Canadians) like Molson Canadian 67. You guessed it: 67 calories per beer. If you still drink your 6-pack per week, it saves you 6 pounds per year
Came
• There really isn’t a low calorie substitute that I know of. Skinny Girl products get some press, but only save you 10 calories per 5-ounce glass of wine. The best we can do with wine is to reduce consumption.
General Alcohol
• If you reduce or eliminate your alcohol, be prepared to start looking for candy in the kitchen. Alcohol carries a large amount of sugar in our bodies 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 effervescence, you can opt for unsweetened sparkling water that you can get at any supermarket.
• Whole Foods has many sodas with no sugar and no artificial sweeteners.
Juice
• If you are like me and you can’t stand water in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning. I mix 8 ounces of water with two ounces of unsweetened cranberry juice which has only 26 calories. It gives me some of the sugar my body wants in the morning with a fraction of the calories. Now I could never drink undiluted juice again. I find it overwhelmingly sweet. Try to dilute your favorite juice little by little over the next few weeks until you get used to it. Eventually, like me, I bet he’ll prefer it that way.
Coffee
First of all, let me tell you that I have not found a good substitute for sugar for your coffee. And the cream is too calorie dense. The double cream in Tim Horton’s Medium Double Double Coffee accounts for 150 of the 210 calories. Go with a medium double milk for 40 calories and you’ve saved 90 calories or 9.38 pounds over the year if you have 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 on your own.
• If you like the creaminess of the cream, you can go for unsweetened coconut milk. 2 ounces will give you only about 10 calories.
So let’s toast not to drink our calories! Toasting with that bottle of water doesn’t sound the same as a crystal wine glass. Oh good.
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