Liquid Calories could be Sabotaging Your Health – How to Stop It From Happening
While all 6 of the Pillars of Nutrition are important – this could be the most important. For many people, consuming calorie-containing beverages, (more specifically sugar- sweetened beverages), is the difference between losing 15-20lbs, or not.
On any given day, a typical American may have a latte (w/whole milk) in the morning, a 20oz Coke or Pepsi at lunch, iced tea from a vending machine in the afternoon, and some ginger ale or another type of soda at dinner. You probably know people who do this. Do you know how many calories a person like this would drink in a day? 800 calories. You’d have to walk 8 miles to burn them all off!
Did you know, from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s, soda and ‘ade (Gatorade, Powerade, Kool Aid, etc) consumption increased 100% in the U.S.? Even worse, in 2002 it was reported that 44% of toddlers (18-24 months) consumed sweetened fruit drinks or soda at least once per day.
Drinking calories is a major problem, but an easy one to fix. Drink water, drink unsweetened tea, drink Crystal Light if you need a sweet fix. Whatever you do, start cutting out calorie-containing beverages today.
If you are currently drinking a lot of sweetened beverages, here’s what you can do to curtail the habit (this works every time). Calculate how many sweetened beverages you are drinking each day. Remove one completely and replace it with water. Take another one of your sweetened beverages and replace it with the ‘diet’ version (you can find the diet version of just about anything). Do this for 1 week. The next week, replace your ‘diet’ drink with water or tea and replace another one of your sweetened beverages with the ‘diet’ version. Repeat the process until you have completely eliminated calorie-containing and sweetened beverages from your diet. This is a painless and effective solution for weaning yourself off of your sugar fix and getting rid of those wasteful and waistline increasing liquid calories.