It’s not that drinking water really makes you lose weight, but it helps, and drinking enough water is absolutely needed for good health, especially when you are losing weight. Here’s why:
1) Water is one of the essential nutrients. You’ll get sick if you don’t get enough. You’ll have lots of different health problems, too many to list.
2) When you reduce the amount of food you eat to lose weight, you reduce the amount of water you get, since most of the water we get is in the food we eat. The result is that your body will start to crave, which you might think is a craving for food when drinking water will prevent or eliminate the craving. To lose weight, drink more water and you have less hunger, less craving.
3) Drinking water when you eat aids in digestion and helps generate a sense of satisfaction when you are losing weight. If you eat without drinking, you’ll need to swallow more to create the same sense of sensory satiety.
4) If you don’t increase your water consumption, your body will hold onto the water you normally eliminate through your stool. Your bowel will literally suck the water from your stool, resulting in hard stool and constipation. Ouch! Drink more water, no constipation!
5) When you start to lose weight and burn your body fat, your body will need to filter out the matter that was in the stored fat, which will be deposited as waste in your kidneys. If you are not flushing your kidneys out well enough, you’ll get waste collecting in there, like kidney stones. Ouch x 1000.
6) The way your body lets you know you need water is by sending you messages that you interpret as thirst or hunger. Whenever you feel thirst or hunger, drink water. If it was thirst, it will be quenched. If it was hunger and it goes away, you’ll begin to realize that it was water you really needed, not food. It will be easier to follow through on your healthy meal plan to lose weight.
7) Water is actually a natural diuretic. If you don’t get enough water, you won’t be flushing excess salt out of your body, and the more salt you retain, the more water you’ll retain in your tissues instead of excreting it. If you drink water when you feel thirsty or hungry, you’ll be getting enough to prevent water retention which shows up on the scale as a false higher reading than what you really are.
You don’t actually need to monitor the amount you drink to know if you are getting enough. You don’t have to make yourself drink a certain number of glasses to make sure you are getting enough. Simply drink water whenever you feel thirsty or hungry. Your body will tell you when you need to drink. And don’t make yourself drink excess amounts of water if you don’t feel like it, just because some diet wacko told you to. You can actually drink too much and get sick from hyper-hydration. Just about anything can be toxic if you overdo it, even water. To lose weight, follow a reasonable meal plan with the right number of calories, as described in my method, drink water whenever you feel thirsty or hungry, and you’ll lose weight without great difficulty and get the right amount of water too.
