I admit it, I don’t drink enough water. Do you?
Very simply, water is the beverage that keeps us alive. Our body is 60 percent water. We need water to move nutrients and waste through and around our body. Even mild dehydration can zap us of energy. So how much is enough?
Well, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) tells us that women living in temperate climates need about 91 ounces of water per day. If one glass is 12 ounces that’s about 7- 8 glasses per day. But do we ALL need that much? The answer is not always. In fact I’ve heard from medical experts around the world the best way to know if you are drinking enough water is to just look at your urine color.
Not drinking enough? Your pee will be dark yellow.
Staying hydrated? It should be very light yellow hue.
But let me get back to the weight loss issue. I didn’t want to talk about pee color and just hydration today. Geez, I think we all know how to stay hydrated. What really I wanted to share with you is how you can lose more weight by drinking water. And there are studies to prove it.
A study done in 2010 divided a group of women on weight loss diets into two groups¹. One group drank 2 cups of water before EVERY meal and the other group did not. Over the course of 12 weeks, the water drinkers lost 4.5 more pounds than the non-water drinkers. Now remember they were both on diets so it was theorized that the women drinking the water reached fullness faster. So logic tells us they essentially ate less.
Okay, I kinda expected that but a weight loss difference of 4.5 pounds? That’s really incredible. And honestly, I am always looking for strategies to help me eat less. Especially strategies that are cheap and always available.
But there’s more…
When they followed up with these women for 12 months what they found was even more interesting to me. The water drinkers that recorded their water intake every day kept the weight off. The women who didn’t gained much of the weight back. Proving that self-monitoring (and drinking the water before meals) helped for the long term. Yep. It’s that easy.
Got you thinking, huh? Yeah, me too. Let’s go get a drink of water!
Heidi
¹Journal of Obesity 2010; 18(2): 300-307 Water consumption increases weight loss during a hypo-caloric diet intervention in middle aged adults.
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