Drinking Water and Weight Loss

Here are some interesting insights into drinking water and weight loss. If you didn't already know it, the human body is made up of about 70 percent water.

To remain healthy, we must remain hydrated at all times and that means replenishing the water that the body loses all the time, mainly through sweating and evaporation, exhalation from the lungs and urinating as one end result of the digestive process.

It naturally follows that drinking water is a necessary action in order to replace that which is lost through these processes. Yet many people don't do enough of it and suffer a variety of health related consequence as a result.

Drinking the right amount of plain water throughout the day is the best way to avoid dehydration problems and maintain a healthy physical balance. But what a lot of people don't know is that by drinking plenty of water, they can actually help their weight loss strategy.

You can literally drink water and lose weight!

Of course, there are several reasons why this happens, but the most important ones are as follows:

Hunger or Thirst?

At certain times throughout he day, many of us will get a craving to eat a snack of some kind. This is often simply put down to having digested our last meal and getting slight pangs of hunger before the next meal is scheduled.

However, it is not always hunger that creates that sensation.

In fact, in most cases it is actually thirst that is causing the feeling of hunger!

The brain often cannot differentiate between the body's request for food or water, especially when we have gotten into the habit of eating snacks whenever we feel that sensation of wanting to eat something between meals.

So the brain mistakes thirst for hunger and that results in us eating a snack (which is often a high calorie, carb-based snack) when all that we really needed was simply a glass of water!

Just think of how many calories that would save you consuming each day if you opted for a glass of plain water every time you felt like eating a snack!

Digestive Juices

The digestion process goes a lot more smoothly when the body is properly hydrated.

The digestion works more efficiently and that means more of what we eat gets processed into the nutrients that our bodies need and the rest gets eliminated with less being stored as fat, especially when we are eating a healthy diet.

Drinking a glass of plain water before each meal helps the digestive process from the start while it also primes our stomachs to receive the food. This also helps make us feel full sooner and gets the all-important message to the brain that we should stop eating before we overeat.

Increase Metabolism

Following on from a more effective digestive process is the resultant boost to the body's metabolism, or metabolic rate.

This is the rate at which food is turned to usable energy and processed by the body. The higher the metabolism, the faster we burn energy, measured in units of calories.

This is weight loss basics in its simplest termswhen focused on what we are consuming as the starting place for managing our body size and weight.

So in this sense, the aim is for a higher metabolism to burn more calories and that leads to weight loss. This is thanks to being able to burn more energy than we are consuming through what we are eating, especially when a lot of what we are ingesting is now water and not high calorie snacks!

[BACK TO TOP]

Posted on Fri, 04 Nov 2011 in weight-loss | 0 Comments