Benefits of Drinking Water – Replacing Fizzy Drinks With Water.

Your body consists of around 70% water, and funnily enough whenever or however the world was created, it was created with great bodies of water. There were no vast pools of soda drinks. Man seemed to have survived through that!

It is only in recent times that we have “LEARN’T” to replace water with other drinks.

I am going to concentrate on two of those “other drinks”, one which is a somewhat addictive drink, and another that we all think is good for us, and it is, but from a weight loss point of view it is not so good.

Sodas or Fizzy drinks, and

Fruit Juices

Both of these categories are quite high in calories and are seemingly very difficult to give up, in particular sodas.

If you are looking to lose weight and are keen to learn some healthy habits on how to loose weight fast, the benefits of water are enormous and these drinks are ideal targets to get great weight loss results and learn a simple weight loss process that you can apply throughout your diet.

To put it simply if you replace 1 can of soda a day and water down your glass of fruit juice by 50%, you will be losing a pound or 2 every week. Who wants to lose 50 pounds this year?

If you have swapped into drinking a diet version of your favorite soda, these principles still apply although the weight loss will be less.

It is important to note that diet sodas are in many ways more harm full to your body than the full strength version. Just sit back and think about what chemicals they have to put into them to make them still taste good without the sugar content!!!

Apart from the obvious weight loss benefits of swapping sodas and juices for water, there are many other benefits of drinking water that are not directly related to weight loss, but have a huge impact on your general sense of wellbeing. Check out “The Healthy Benefits of Drinking Water” for more information.

With those details out of the way lets look at how you can approach the process of LEARNING how to replace calorie filled or unhealthy drinks with good old water.

Understand that you do not need to drink sodas and other high calorie drinks. You learned about them and now it is your choice.

Accept that you make those choices

Look for the things that you associate with these types of drinks

Make the decision to break that association

Be prepared to do whatever it takes

Devise your plan

Go for it.

This is not a complicated process but it is critical that you follow each step. This is not really about food, drink, weight loss, or anything to do with how to lose weight. It is all about changing habits that you have acquired, or learned.

Understand that you do not need to drink sodas and other high calorie drinks:

There is not one person every born into this world that has a NEED or REQUIREMENT to drink sodas and or juices. The only dietary requirement you were born with was to consume mother’s milk. It is only at the time that your parents decide to give you anything else that you began to LEARN about other forms of sustenance.

So if you genuinely wish to lose weight and to use water substitution as a part of that process, then you must first understand that it is not your body that wants the soda, it is the habit you have developed that is determining your actions.

Accept that you make those choices:

OK so I am sure it is not too hard to understand that your body does not need sodas. However it is a totally different thing to accept that for your self. Many people understand the reasons about why, but are incapable of seeing that this actually applies to them selves.

So unless you can look yourself in the mirror and accept that it is just YOUR choice as to what you drink, then there is little point going any further. Sure you may have some success, but it is highly likely you will revert back to your old habits, and comfort levels.

Look for the things that you associate with these types of drinks:

One of the strongest reasons an action or decision becomes a habit is that it is associated with another action. I used to smoke, and for a short period of about 12 months I used to travel about 20 minutes to work and back again with my best mate. For some reason or another we developed a habit of having three cigarettes on the way to work. When I sat down and thought about it, we used to light up at exactly the same locations every day.

Now some days our trip would be 20 minutes and others 40 minutes. But we always had three and we always lit up at the places and we always had 3 smokes.

If you take a look at when, why and who you drink with and reflect on how long you have done that for, I am sure you will realize that you are just as used to the association as you are to the actual drink itself. Here is a little experiment. Lets say you normally have a can of coke with your buddies at morning tea.

So tomorrow go and buy yourself something slightly different. Say a pepsi instead of coke. Firstly take note about how you feel when you order something different. And secondly watch out to see if anyone notices. Note they may not say anything as it is only a subtle change, but if you have been doing this for some time with the same people, I would be surprised if there were not at least a couple of eyes drifting onto your can or bottle trying to work out what is different.

Make the decision to break that association

It was many years and a lot of false starts before I learned how to become a non smoker. And there were 3 major reasons why I succeeded. Firstly, I was ready to quit, and I mean really ready.

Secondly I enrolled in a course called smoke enders. And they literally taught the group of us how to give up smoking.

It was an 8 week course and each week we broke down some of the habits that are common among smokers. It was not even a part of the program to start to cut down until about week 5. But I can assure you I had already considerably cut down, because while I was allowed to smoke as much as I liked, I could not smoke with my cup of coffee! ( I think that rule came in at about week 4). Now I used to have another cup of coffee so that I could have another couple of smokes, so it was easy to see how I could begin to break down the habit.

And finally I put myself at risk. I did this in 2 ways, firstly the course cost $500-00. and Secondly I promised a close friend I would do it. The more powerful risk of the 2 was absolutely the fear of failing to keep my promise.

I am sorry to harp on about smoking but you see there is a very strong relationship here. Firstly smoking and drinking cans of sodas are both highly habitual actions. Secondly they both contain drugs that are highly addictive, nicotine and caffeine. The similarities don’t stop there. While both drugs are very addictive, ie they get you hooked quickly, the addictive pull that they have over your physical body is gone with in a couple of days!

So it is critical that you identify what where and who you associate drinking sodas with. Only then can you realistically plan ways to combat those associations.

Be prepared to do whatever it takes:

Now this is a hard thing to do, but now that you know the what where and who with, are you prepared to pull out a bottle of water in front of your mates. There could be some ridicule!!! Hey human nature is human nature, its not their fault. And by the way, just like the addiction thing, it will go away in a couple of days.

Devise your plan:

Now that we have confronted our “Soda Demons” it is time to put an action plan together to minimize the pain. Here are a couple of suggestions if you want to ease your self into it:

Change brands as I mentioned earlier.

Change to the diet version. Please just use this as a diversion. The chemicals in these drinks really are not good for you.

Change type of drink. Ie go from coke to lemonade or fanta.

Change to a sports drink. Note that you should not drink more than one of these a day unless you have exerted yourself to the extent of at least an hours hard workout, a game of sport or if you have a very active job. They are high in salt and this can play havoc with the balance of your body. I have seen guys feint after drinking 2!! And that’s after playing sport.

Change to a flavoured water

Drink a glass of water before you go to morning tea

Don’t go to morning tea, go for a walk instead

Make the change during a holiday break

With your fruit juices it is likely to be a much simpler process as there is likely to be less association. I recommend you just simply start by filling the last 10% of your glass with water and over the period of a week or so increase the amount to 50% or even 60%. You actually don’t need that amount of concentrated juice, and this process will retrain your taste buds to a new level of acceptance of what juice should taste like.

Finally - Go for it.

Spill your guts to your mates or a loved one, of your commitment to give up soda drinks and lose a few pounds. It does not need to be a big thing, hey its not a socially unacceptable thing, its just your choice. But if you just let someone know what you are doing it will help to make you accountable, and confirm your commitment to your sub conscious mind.

Steve regularly writes about common sense health and fitness topics like this one on the benefits of drinking water. Here is another popular article on "Can Water Make You Lose Weight"