The Truth About Drinking Water To Lose Weight
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Does water help you lose weight? Common knowledge says yes, but here are some surprising facts science found about this wisdom.
Drink Water, Lose Weight?
You already a long time ago saw me mention it as one of the definite “secret weapons” when trying to lose weight: drinking water. But does drinking all that water really do anything and is there more than anecdotal evidence for it?
That is exactly what scientists from Berlin’s School of Public Health tried to find out. But to their surprise and despite the topic being so popular, very, very few properly done studies ever examined it.
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (Studies)
Going through many medical databases, they came up with about 5,000 papers concerning water consumption, but many looked at something completely different or were done so badly that they didn’t yield any reliable results. At the end they had only 11 studies that seemed promising.
11 out of 5,000 – and I thought passing my final exams was hard. But the good news is that of those 11, three expressly looked at overweight people and these found drinking water really worked, especially when done together with a weight loss or maintenance program.
The fountain of weight loss?
In one of these three, for example, people drank about half a liter more water than their diet plan demanded and they shedded more pounds than those on the plan who didn’t. The Berlin researchers reason that the water may have replaced the calorie-laden softdrinks participants would have normally consumed, making weight loss easier.
But before we start rejoicing, I also have to mention that they fired off a word of caution: the other eight studies looked at people from “mixed” weight groups, meaning from skinny to fat, and there results were much more uneven. For thin or normal weight people, the water seemed to have only little effect on body weight.
It Works Only In The Overweight?
So on one hand we now have some scientific evidence that drinking water really helps lose weight. Which nicely ties in with my experience back from losing weight: I calculated that before I lost weight, I consumed about 400 fluid kcal per day, most coming from softdrinks. That was 2,800 kcal per week. As losing one pound of body weight requires a deficit of 3,500 kcal, that is hefty.
What I can’t understand is why water apparently didn’t help in weight maintenance among normal weight people. I still minimize liquid calories and it has now been five years that I managed to keep my weight steady. I’m not sure if going back to regular softdrinks wouldn’t make that much more difficult.
Pictures courtesy of Gareth Haywood and “Josh“.
12 Comments
“The Berlin researchers reason that the water may have replaced the calorie-laden softdrinks participants would have normally consumed, making weight loss easier.
But before we start rejoicing, I also have to mention that they fired off a word of caution: the other eight studies looked at people from “mixed” weight groups, meaning from skinny to fat, and there results were much more uneven. For thin or normal weight people, the water seemed to have only little effect on body weight.”
I think this observation is exactly correct, and explains the difference. It’s a matter of replacing a calorie dense food (soft drinks) with a calorie poor/free alternative (water).
If there isn’t already a large amount of liquid calories coming in then you won’t notice a difference with the swap. Imagine two men have the same percentage of daily calories from soda, one is 150 lbs, the other is the same height, but 300 lbs. To maintain their size, the 300 lb man needs to consume about ~1000kcal more, so if they both swap all soda for water, naturally the person eating 1000kcal more in a day will see the biggest difference.
Good explanation! Personally I’ll stick with water and calorie-free softdrinks. It worked for half a decade and I’m not going to experiment with it.
I do drink water! I also use it to dilute products to lower the salt and calorie amounts per given volume.
Yeah, me too. I don’t even buy bottled water anymore, ever since I found out that tap water has perfectly fine mineral content.
Hmmm! I drink a lot of water it is my favorite drink. I have never been one to drink a lot of liquid calories ever. I drink more water than I really want to because the experts said I should to control my weight. I don’t really know if it works. I do know that I am tired of having bathroom emergencies so a definitive answer on this water thing would be really nice.
I think most important is: does it work for you? If you switch back to drinking only when you really are thirsty, do you tend to gain weight?
I find there are so many variables in my life it is hard to tell what is working and what is not. My biggest problem is stress. When I am stressed everything else suffers. What is nice is that before I started trying to improve my health I thought I handled stress well and was fairly blind to it. Now it is easy to see when I am stressed as it effects my weight lifting in particular in a substantial way.
True words!
I drink a lot of water just because!! I don’t know that I ever tried it as a weight loss but I also have never drank a lot of calorie heavy drinks (except my wine).
I always assumed that it wasn’t so much the water that helped in weight loss as the idea of cutting out the drinks that are full of calories.
Yup! It seems it simply takes up room. But as long as it works, it works.
I love water. I’m surprised there aren’t more thorough studies looking into water consumption and weight loss. Water consumption seems to help with everything! 🙂
I suppose it’s because you can’t sell pure and simple water for as much as some supplement 🙂