The importance of water to weight loss cannot be underestimated. Only too often people on weight loss plans get disheartened with their weight loss efforts because they are basing their success on what the scales is telling them.
We’ve written on this topic before, the importance of hydration, and in this podcast we’ve one key objective – to help listeners understand that in many instances it’s your water levels that may be affecting your weight loss efforts. If you listen to the podcast you’ll hear that because the weighing scales is weighing all of you – muscle, fat and water, that if you’ve water retention then it may well mask the fact that you really did lose weight that week.
Water retention occurs for a wide range of reasons but chief among them is stress, heat, hormones and too much caffeine. In fact, in many instances, your body will retain fluid because you’ve not given it enough water. To make sense of that, when you give your body the recommended amount, which we say is around the 2 litre mark, then your body is adequately hydrated and it doesn’t need to retain fluid.
Why drink water?
Besides the obvious that we need water to live, it has been shown that when we are adequately hydrated, the energy burn or consumption of calories goes up by 30% within 10 minutes of drinking the water. This effect lasts for about an hour.
There is no exact figure on the calorie burn count but it’s estimated to be about 100 calories. So, for nothing more than drinking 8 glasses of water a day, you’ll burn up to 700 calories in a week.
Exercise, diet and water combined will all improve your weight loss efforts.
Click the link below to listen to the The Importance of Water To Weight Loss podcast.
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