Is drinking water to lose weight effective?

You might hear that drinking water to lose weight is effective because water has zero calories. Or that you can lose weight by drinking water before you eat will fill you up so you don't eat as much. How true are those things?

Maybe you're wondering if drinking water to lose weight is just some nutty fad... our conventional doctors never discuss drinking water at all do they? We occasionally hear about drinking water for our health, but what's it all about? And what on earth does it have to do with losing weight??

Drinking sufficient water every day is not only a good thing to do for health, it's essential! Having a proper body weight is simply one aspect of having a healthy body. In other words, weight loss isn't some secret, unattainable or hard to understand activity. It's part of overall health and drinking water on a daily basis has a direct effect on health AND weight!

The reason why drinking water to lose weight is effective is related to how the body metabolizes fat. Virtually every function of the body requires water in some way - and that includes body weight maintenance.

An important health benefit of water is its role in fat metabolism. The secret to fat metabolism is to drink adequate amounts of water! Why? The kidneys need water to filter out waste and toxins from our bodies. If we don't give our bodies the water it needs, the kidneys "dump" some of their workload on the liver.

One of the liver's jobs is to assist in fat metabolism. If the kidneys can't do their job due to insufficient water (dehydration), some of their work is given to the liver. You may know what it's like if you have to do someone else's work. You can't do all of your own!

When the liver is doing some of the kidney's job, the liver can't do its own job of metabolizing fat very well.

This is the main reason why drinking water to lose weight is not a fad at all - it's because that's how the body works!

How much water do we need to drink? The old "8 glasses a day" is merely an average. And the actual amount the body needs is dependent upon weight, not some "one amount fits all" figure.

The body needs, on a daily basis, one-half of your body weight in ounces of water. For example, someone who weighs 200 pounds, whether overweight or not, needs 100 ounces or about 3 liters of water per day. (Convert ounces to liters tool)

That might seem unattainable to many of us for several reasons. The problems, explanations and solutions to increasing the amount of water you consume daily is covered well in the article, the health benefit of water. I won't go into all that here because this article would be far too long!

As an illustration that drinking water to lose weight is effective, I have a friend who was on a successful journey of weight loss. She hit a plateau and was getting frustrated. I asked her how much water she was drinking (hardly any) and she promptly increased her water intake... BAM! She continued to lose weight by drinking enough water.

Cheers,
BB

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