Anyone who has ever ventured into a health kick or weight loss journey would have been given the advice to drink more water. Often, this is given to them blindly as it seems logic that filling your stomach with something that doesn’t have any calories, is surely better than filling your stomach with something that consists of calories which could potentially get stored as body fat if unused.
With this advice, the very next morning you get your water bottle filled up and ready to go, pack half the usual food that you’d take for the day because, really when you’ve got this magic weight-loss formula, why would you need so much food! So you get to work starting and everything is going fine, you’ve had a snack or two as usual, then lunch time rolls around you eat another snack and you’re still feeling hungry, but that’s only because you haven’t been drinking enough water! So you’re finishing off you’re 2nd litre of water at 4pm and by this time, you’re starving. You’ve got huge cravings for some absolutely terrible foods. What happened? You drank the water like they said - the daily recommended amount before dinner!
What happened, was what is supposed to happen! Water gets digested differently to food. So here’s some info on digestion and hunger that may help you understand how it all works:
- When foods are ingested through the mouth and esophagus, the first port of call is the stomach.
- The stomach holds onto larger, more solid objects longer than water which passes straight through. Everything else must travel through the intestines before it gets digested.
- As soon as food or liquids are digested, the body sends a signal for your appetite to start increasing.
- The more complex something is, like whole-grain products, the longer it takes to get through the Gastro-Intestinal organs and the longer you stay full!
So, back to the study- over a 12 week period they found that people who drank 500ml of water prior to eating a meal had more advanced weight loss than the people who didn’t (an extra 2.3kgs over the study period).
So a helpful tool for portion control and weight loss could be to consume water before eating to help with satiety and possibly leading to not eating as much during that meal.
Lastly, studies have also been done to identify the differences between a standard plate of food, or the same food blended and consumed as a soup and surprisingly, the soup has the upper hand! Read more: Soup vs Standard Plate
Thanks for reading. I’d love to find out how you are going with any weight loss, health goals or water drinking experiments. Feedback is more than welcome via:
kyle@exerciseyourpotential.com.au or Exercise Your Potential on Facebook
