Drink Water, Lose Weight

By Marc Hertz, Tonic

The search for a no-fail weight-loss solution is right up there with pursuing of the Fountain of Youth. The sheer number of different diets out there is staggering. That said, among the multitude of weight-loss ideas, this one seems like a good choice to me. As Discovery News reports, a study has found that drinking water prior to meals can help people lose an average of nearly five pounds.

The study, done by scientists at Virginia Tech, featured 48 adults between the ages of 55 and 75 over a 12-week period. Twenty-four of the adults were on a low-calorie diet and also drank two glasses of water prior to each meal, while the other 24 had the same diet and got water as well, but weren’t told specifically when to drink it. At the end of the study, people in the first group had lost an average of about 15.5 pounds, as opposed to the average of 11 pounds people in the second group shed. In addition, a year after the study, those who drank the water prior to the meals were doing a better job keeping the weight off.

One thing to keep in mind is that the low-calorie diet these people were instructed to keep ranged between 1,200 and 1,500 calories per day, and that range could have something to do with the weight loss difference. But, see, that’s the point of drinking more water; it helps fill you up, without calories, so when you have your meal, you don’t feel the need to eat as much.

The results could also be age-specific. As the article notes, as you age, the digestive process slows down, meaning you feel full longer the older you are. But, as Brenda Davy, one of the study’s researchers, notes, drinking more water could still help in dieting, no matter what your age. That’s because it can increase metabolism, thus helping to burn more calories, or it can act as a replacement for other drinks that have calories, sugar or, well, both.

So if you’re going to raise a glass, think about making it water. As Barry Popkin, director of the Inter-Disciplinary Obesity Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is quoted, “The fewer calories we get from beverages, the healthier we’re going to be.”

Image Credit: Tsja! via Flickr