Best Drinks For Weight Loss (and What Drinks To Avoid)
Are you trying to lose weight and you’re taking a closer look at what you’re drinking?
The choices you make for your beverages can significantly impact your weight and your overall health. Not paying attention to your drinkable calories can easily add up to weight gain and make it harder to lose weight.
Here’s a look at drinks that can help support weight loss and a list of ones you’ll want to avoid.
Drinks That Support Weight Loss
Drink #1 – Water and Carbonated Water
We often confuse thirst for hunger since both instincts can cause our mouths to water. Drinking water helps with weight loss because it fills up your stomach to reduce the feelings of hunger and cravings. It’s also zero calories.
You know you’re thirsty if you drink something and the feeling goes away. But if what you’re feeling is hunger you’ll still feel hungry after your drink.
If you cannot stand plain water there are other options,
Carbonated water, flavored or plain
Plain tea
Make a fruit-flavored infusion of water
Drink #2 – Green Tea and Black Tea
Studies have shown that regular consumption of black or green tea helps to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. Some studies have even suggested that drinking green tea can help boost your metabolism, although it’s not statistically significant, because green tea has antioxidants called catechins that support fat burning. But just relying on green tea to help you lose weight and burn fat won’t work because you need to be in a caloric deficit to lose weight not just rely on the green tea antioxidants.
Photo by Massimo Rinaldi on Unsplash
Drinks To Avoid
Avoid Drink #1 – Fruit Juice and Smoothies
Eating fruit is very different from drinking the juice itself whether it’s straight up or put in a smoothie with milk.
When you eat fruit, you also eat all the fiber that comes along with it. Fiber helps slows down the insulin release that helps your body absorb the sugar. Drinking fruit juice is equivalent to drinking straight sugar even if the sugar comes from fruit.
Another issue with drinking fruit juice is the label, 100% not from concentrate.
The juices from most big-name companies are extracted from the fruit months it gets to the grocery shelf. The extracted juice is stored in holding tanks before it’s ready to be packaged in different cartoons and distributed.
After months of sitting around juice loses its flavor and its color so manufacturers add back flavors, additives, and color to the juice to meet our expectations. By the time you drink the juice, the state of the juice is completely different from when it was originally extracted.
Photo by Fanny Gustafsson on Unsplash
Avoid Drink #2 – Lattes and Frappuccino
We love our coffee and coffee drinks. Every year coffee shops create unique seasonal products that include lots of whip cream and sugary syrups that taste delicious and are high in calories.
But the negative side effects of the drinks are not so great. Besides the excessive amount of sugar and calories in the drinks, they also spike our insulin levels.
Insulin is a hormone that helps our bodies convert sugar into energy sources that our cells can use. When we constantly get insulin spikes from our diets we become resistant to its signals. Insulin resistance leads to a buildup of sugar in your bloodstream which leads to fatigue, hunger, brain fog, and an expanding waistline.
When we are consistently resistant to insulin we develop Type II diabetes. So skip the whip cream and sugar and go for coffee instead.
Avoid Drink #3 – Protein Drinks and Shakes
Protein is the best macronutrient you can eat for weight loss, staying lean, and building muscle. It takes longer for your body to digest and up to 30% of its calories are burned off through digestion and absorption.
Unfortunately, decent protein powders and protein shakes are hard to find. Most manufacturers add lots of fillers, additives, and artificial ingredients to make them taste good and have a nice consistency when blended. This adds unnecessary calories and unhealthy ingredients.
The protein powder industry is so competitive that companies will intentionally spike their powders with cheap fillers with no benefits to cut production costs and pass inspection.
Adding protein to your diet is great but choose to eat your protein versus drinking your protein. Liquid calories do not fill you up and keep you satisfied like eating real food does because the liquid form of protein doesn’t require as much transit time through your digestive system.
Also, since you are drinking protein you don’t need to chew it or digest it which doesn’t trigger the signal that your body has ‘eaten’ at all despite the calories. It doesn’t register in your brain that you've acquired calories because your stomach didn’t relay signals of fullness.
Instead, opt for eating your protein not drinking it. You’ll save a lot of money on it too.
Avoid Drink #4 – Energy Drinks and Soda
A 12-ounce can of soda can contain between 25 to 180 calories all coming from sugar which can be between 8 to 11 teaspoons in each can. This also applies to energy drinks which contain just as much sugar with caffeine to boost energy and focus.
You're probably thinking you can easily switch to a diet soda or a zero-sugar version but you trade off negative side effects.
Swapping regular soda for diet soda means you’re swapping real sugar for artificial sugar or sugar alcohols which are worse than actual sugar. Diet sodas taste sweet with fewer or no calories because companies add sugar alcohols to their drinks which are not processed or recognized by your body as an energy source but will still have the side effects of real sugar.
When you’re drinking sugar alcohols, your body will kick up your hunger response because although you’re drinking sugars your body cannot absorb the calorie from sugar alcohols as it passes through because it doesn't have any calories associated with it. Artificial sugars and sugar alcohols come with side effects such as bloating, gas, and diarrhea. Ingested in larger quantities they can also cause headaches though symptoms vary from person to person.
It's best to avoid these drinks altogether.
List of artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols.
Avoid Drink #5 - Alcohol
This includes all alcohol including wine. Our body treats and processes alcohol like a poison. When we drink alcohol our bodies switch from a fat-burning mode to alcohol processing mode for up to 48 to 72 hours after our last drink.
Drinking leads to lowered inhibition and less sensitivity to taste which influences you towards eating more palatable foods that are sweeter, saltier, and richer tasting with more calories. With lowered inhibitions we lean towards additional drinking and eating hurting our weight loss efforts.
Hopefully, this gives you a better idea of what to drink more of and drinks to start cutting back on your routine. If you want similar information for food and weight loss check out my post Easy Easy To Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
Candace is the owner of Rhodes To Strength. She provides weight loss and mindset coaching services to women around the world so that they keep the pounds off for good. She believes in working with clients to create sustainable habits that work for their lifestyle.
You can find her rollerskating, hiking, and bird watching in her spare time.