Drinking Water Can Boost the Results of Your Diet

We all have a little Bobby Boucher on our shoulders, reminding us to drink some high-quality H2O. Yet even with the Waterboy’s pleading reminders, we somehow put it off or replace it with soda, energy drinks, coffees, and cocktails. But I’ve got a reason to drink water that just might motivate you to listen to this advice: drinking water can help boost the effectiveness of your diet and promote weight loss. 

That’s right! By simply drinking an adequate amount of water, you can speed up weight loss. There aren’t many things in life that are so effective, and yet so cheap and widely accessible. But water is one of those few things. 

How can water help you lose weight? 

So how can water help you lose weight? There are a number of ways. Let’s look at the most obvious ways first. When you’re drinking water, you’re not drinking other, higher-calorie alternatives. In fact, water is the original 0 calories beverage. When you drink it, you’re getting tons of health benefits without any calorie guilt. 

Here’s a fun experiment. Replace all of your non-water drinks (or as many as you can) with water. And add up the calories of each beverage you replaced. Your latte, fruit juice, smoothies, sodas, energy drinks, and more. At the end of the day, look at the total, and see how many calories you avoided, just by drinking water. 

In addition to replacing liquid calories and, of course, staying hydrated, drinking water also suppresses your appetite. That might sound strange that water can fill you up, but it’s true. Before your next meal, drink a glass or two of water, and you’ll see that you become full with less food. And don’t stop there. Drink a glass after your meal because water aids digestion. And healthy digestion is another way to boost the effectiveness of your diet. 

Knowing that drinking water suppresses appetite, use this to your advantage. The next time you’re feeling hungry between meals, instead of grabbing an unhealthy, calorie-dense snack, go for a few gulps of water. You’ll notice your cravings dissipate. 

So water can take the place of other drinks, it can help you eat smaller portions, and it can cut down on snacking. But there’s more! Water helps burn fat. More specifically, your body needs water to metabolize stored fat. When you drink water, the molecules interact with fats and create glycerol and fatty acids—two chemicals essential for metabolizing fat. This means that if you’re dieting and exercising, but you’re not drinking enough water, then you aren’t burning as much fat as you could and should be. 

How much water should you drink? 

We’ve heard the recommendation to drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water per day for a total of 64 ounces. But there is a problem with this one-size-fits-all rule. It doesn’t account for differences in size, activity level, or environment. For example, a 6-foot tall, 275-pound runner living in Phoenix, AZ, will need more water than a 5’ 3”, 160-pound office worker in Seattle, WA. 64 ounces of water per day might be enough for the office worker, but the runner might need three to five times that amount of water just to maintain a healthy level of hydration. 

A better rule for figuring out how much water you need is to drink a half-ounce to a full ounce of water for every pound. So if you weigh 200 pounds, you need to drink between 100 and 200 ounces of water per day. 

That might sound impossible for someone who doesn’t drink much water. But you don’t have to dive in headfirst. Increase your intake incrementally every couple of days. If you’re starting with barely drinking any water, then set yourself a goal of 64 ounces per day. And once you do that a few times, boost it to 74 ounces. The goal is to set realistic goals and achieve them.

If you want to see physical results, you need to combine proper hydration with a sound diet. One strong option is Diet Center’s Fast21 21-Day Diet. It consists of a flexible meal plan with foods that will help you burn fat and suppress your appetite. And it even includes a premium protein supplement and water enhancer. It will optimize the fat-burning capacity of all that water you’re drinking now!