It’s great hear to how motivated people are to lose weight. Unfortunately, their efforts can easily be foiled and they may not even realize why. You might be focused on the foods you eat but are you forgetting how easily it is to drink extra calories from sugared drinks and alcohol?
If you want a quick way to shed weight, the best and simplest way to do so is to eliminate alcohol, juices and sodas from your diet.
Alcohol contains lots of sugar.
Drinking alcoholic beverages are one of the easiest ways to sabotage your weight loss efforts. They contain so much sugar and sugar leads to weight gain especially around the waist (think “beer belly”). I’m sure you’re arguing “But everyone says one glass of wine a day is good for you!” Sure it is, if you aren’t complaining that you have to lose weight. If you are, understand that beers, wine, and most of all, mixed cocktails, will do your weight loss efforts in. Everyone knows how easy it is to reach for that second drink, then the third and before you know it, you’ve had too many (sugars) and are feeling dehydrated (which also affects your weight loss efforts). Simply put, don’t whine about losing weight if you are wining every night! (See what I just did there?)
Don’t get your vitamins from juice.
Juices are loaded with…you guessed it, sugar! I’ve even compared the sugar content to soda, and several juices surpass the sugar content in soda! That is insane, when all of the advertising efforts lead one to believe that juice is the way to go to get in our vitamins. I used to drink V8 splash because their sugar content is about 18 grams of sugar per 8 ounces, which is about half of what most juices contain. Still, when you consider that women should be consuming no more than 26 grams of added sugar per day and men should be consuming no more than 38 grams of added sugar per day, that’s quite a chunk of your daily quota and is it really worth it?? Hey, I love V8 splash, but it’s not worth it to me.
Ok, so one can argue that fruit contain natural sugars, therefore some of the sugars listed in the nutrition facts must also be factoring those in too, right? I agree. However, it’s then that I would look at the ingredients on the bottle. Where is sugar or any of it’s cousins listed? Is it listed as the first, second, even third ingredients? If so, you can guarantee that the grams of sugar listed in the nutrition facts are primarily added sugars.
Don’t get me started on soda!
The laundry list of reasons why you should immediately remove sodas from your diet and that of anyone you care about, is pretty long. In this post, I’ll just focus on how it’ll ruin your weight loss efforts. Once again, the guilty party here is sugar and sugar substitutes. Aside from the sugars, soda has absolutely NO NUTRITIOUS VALUE. So, why are you wasting your precious calories on soda?
On a personal note…
Many years ago, I used to drink about a can of soda every hour while working as a maid in a Las Vegas hotel. I developed severe abdominal pains which kept me doubled over. After several invasive tests it was determined that I had developed Hypoglycemia, which if left untreated would have lead to Diabetes. While I did cut back on hourly sodas, it remained my go-to drink for many years. After one failed attempt to eliminate soda from my diet, I can proudly say I’ve been soda-free since March 2015. Yay! Anyway, that’s my personal soda story. Believe me, I know soda is a tough one to give up, but I promise it will be worth it.
My recommendation:
If you want to lose weight, don’t waste your caloric intake on drinks of ANY kind. DRINK WATER. Your body is made up of about 65% of the stuff!
BONUS TIP: With it being so easy to become dehydrated, you can improve your efforts to stay hydrated by replacing all of your beverages with water. A good formula to follow is one ounce of water per 2 pounds of body weight. That may sound like a lot of water, but you’ll get used to drinking it.
