Magic Elixir and liquids to avoid

The sun is finally shining and the weather is good! With the heat outside, our bodies naturally tend to overheat as well so it is very important to stay hydrated and quench your thirst. We often do not realize we are thirst and many times mistake thirst for hunger so make sure to drink plenty of water even when you don't feel thirsty.

I came across this article on how various liquids affect weight gain over the year, take a look and see what liquids you can eliminate. The magic weight loss elixir which came out on top is none other than our friend… H2O!!!  Enjoy.

— From Men's Health by David Zinczenko

There is a potion that magically strips away pounds
from your body, improves your overall health, lengthens your life, makes
you more attractive to the opposite sex, and keeps you lean forever.
Even better, you can have as much of this magic weight-loss potion as
you want, for free, and start stripping away pounds—perhaps even several
dozen pounds this year alone—without exercise, without dieting, without
visiting the set of Nip/Tuck.

What is this magical elixir? It’s
water.

Really? Really. You don't even need to mix in that fancy
fat-burning stuff from the vitamin store. In fact, the less you
supplement your food and beverage intake, the more weight you’ll lose
(and the more money you’ll save). Keep reading this five-point plan from
the new book Drink This, Not That! and begin your no diet
weight-loss goals today. You'll sip your way to a flat belly in record
time–and keep it well beyond summer.

Step 1: Swear Off the Soda and Iced Tea
(Annual
Weight Loss: 18 Pounds!)

The National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey measured where most of our calories come from.
Researchers broke up America’s food intake into 143 different categories
and discovered, to their horror, that the category making up the
largest percentage of our calorie intake—7.1 percent, to be exact—was
not a food at all. It was soda. (Vegetables, on the other hand,
accounted for only 6.5 percent of our intake. Chicken and fish together
only added up to 5.7 percent.) To put that into perspective, if you ate
an average of 2,500 calories a day, and you cut 7 percent of your
calories, you’d automatically drop down to 2,325, a difference that
would save you 1.5 pounds per month. You could be 9 pounds lighter in 6
months by going cold-turkey today!

Step 2: Drink 8 Cups of Water Every Day
(Annual
Weight Loss: 26 Pounds!)

Yes, the magic elixir really does have
amazing powers. In one study, a group of 173 overweight women were put
through diet and nutrition training using mainstream diet programs.
Researchers then followed them for 10 months, with dietary and body
composition being recorded up to 12 months after the classes. All women
in the program lost weight, but those drinking more water lost more
weight. Drinking more than 1 liter of water per day (nearly 4½ cups) was
associated with an extra 5.07 pounds lost in 12 months.

And
researchers from the University of Utah found that people who drink the
most water have higher metabolisms. In a study, subjects drank 4, 8, or
12 cups of water each day. Those who drank at least 8 cups reported
better concentration and higher energy levels, and tests showed that
they were burning more calories than the 4-cups-a-day group.

Step 3: Enjoy One, Two, or Even Three Yogurt-Based
Smoothies a Day
(Annual Weight Loss: 10 Pounds!)

I
love the sound of a cranking blender. But a combination of ice, dairy,
and fruit does more than just make a teeth-rattling cacophony in your
kitchen. It also helps strip pounds from your body.

There are
three simple reasons why: Smoothies take little time to make (so you can
quash your hunger pangs quickly), they’re packed with nutrition
(especially if you start with Greek yogurt and add berries, whey
protein, and some flax), and their thickness takes up a lot of space in
your stomach, crowding out the Doritos. In fact, researchers at Purdue
University found that people stayed fuller longer when they drank thick
drinks than when they drank thin ones, and a study at Penn State found
that people who drank yogurt shakes that had been blended until they
doubled in volume ate 96 fewer calories a day than those consuming
thinner drinks.

Step 4: Avoid Juice Drinks
(Annual Weight
Loss: 19 Pounds!)

Imagine a world in which we called products
what they really were: Hungry Man Dinners would be called Lonely Man
Dinners. ESPN would be called the Fat Nerds Yap about Jocks Channel. And
SunnyD would be called Obesi-D because there’s nothing sunny about a
drink marketed to kids that looks and tastes like juice, but is 95
percent water and corn syrup.

While even 100 percent juice has
its problems, juice drinks and their ilk are the worse offenders. One
16-ounce bottle of SunnyD Smooth packs a whopping 180 straight-up empty
calories and 40 grams of sugar. If you drink one a day, cut it out.
You’ll lose 19 pounds in a year!

Step 5: Drink Coffee, Not Coffee Drinks
(Annual
Weight Loss: 18 Pounds!)

Researchers studied coffee habits in
New York and found that two-thirds of Starbucks’ customers opted for
blended coffee drinks over regular brewed coffee or tea. The average
caloric impact of the blended drinks was 239 calories. The regular
coffee or tea, by comparison, was only 63 calories after factoring in
added cream and sugar. So even if you like your coffee sweet and light,
you can strip away 176 calories every day, just by making this one swap.

Now, budding mathematicians among you may notice that all this
adds up to a whopping 91 pounds lost in a single year. This is not good
news if you weigh 125. (However, travel just got a lot cheaper because
now you can mail yourself all over the world.) Fact is, unless you're
currently engaging in all of the bad habits above, you probably don't
have 91 pounds to lose.

But this five-point plan illustrates how
extraordinarily easy it is to shed extra weight—a lot of weight—just by
watching what we drink. And that, my friends, is something worth raising
a glass to.