Don’t drink soda

When speaking to people about weight loss, always the subject of soft drink, soda or pop gets a mention. To avoid confusion in this article I will refer to such drinks as soda.

Now, unless you have been living under a rock or you just have rocks in your head, you know that drinking soda will hamper your weight loss efforts.

Bad for your teeth, bad for your general well being and really bad for the weight.

To illustrate the point, an ordinary 355ml can of soda has 140 calories and 39 grams of sugar! That’s a enormous amount of sugar!

Can you eat that much sugar by choice? The answer I expect, is no. The reality is, we can slam down a can of soda in under 5 minutes and in doing so are drinking 9 teaspoons of sugar.

Common sense dictates this is an unhealthy practice and when attempting to lose weight and must be avoided at all costs.

Are They Bad For You?

So what about diet pop? Could they be consumed when you want to lose weight?

Since most people would do when trying to answer questions such as this, we shall ‘Google’ it. Give it a try! I did and got about two million search results ranging from diet sodas will make you fat, to diet sodas don’t have any effect whatsoever on weight loss.

So where does that leave the average person who’s trying to shed weight? Confused? You Bet!

At a fundamental level they seem benign to our weight loss efforts, after all it has zero calories and zero sugar. Now, basically weight loss is a simple equation of a person using more calories than consumed, forcing your body to burn stored energy sources such as fat, which causes weight loss.

What The Research Tells Us

In terms of how they affect weight loss, theoretically they ought to be fine since they contain no sugar or calories. When looking at the research it gets even more confusing, as numerous studies site diet soda as a cause of weight gain whilst others state diet soda will aid weight loss.

Without going into the merits of all these studies (some of which don’t even charge their sources), it’s safe to say an argument can be mounted on each side. It appears, as with a lot of health and fitness related topics, opinions can be divided.

“On average, for each diet soda our participants drank daily, they were 65 percent more likely to become overweight during the next seven to eight years, and 41 percent more likely to become obese,” said Sharon Fowler, M.P.H., faculty associate in the division of clinical epidemiology at the Health Science Center’s department of medicine.”

What the study doesn’t tell you is why there’s a correlation, in fact the causation for the weight gain is unclear.

In trying to interpret the results Fowler hypothesizes that: “It might be that normal-weight men and women in our research whose weight had been increasing had switched to diet soda in an attempt to stop their weight gain,” she said. “That’s a very real possibility. Another is that drinking soda, either diet or regular, is part of a lifelong ‘Obey your thirst’ nutritional routine that sets up someone for weight gain later in life.

But Fowler pointed out if someone is drinking them, he or she is drinking it to the exclusion of healthy alternatives such as milk, water, or juice. “Can you think of one good thing that comes out of a diet soda can on your body? You’re giving yourself the taste of nourishment without any at all, so it might be that you seek it from other foods, such as high-calorie desserts,” she said. “Even though you fool your tongue, you don’t fool your mind. It is not satisfied. What our analyses indicate for certain is that drinking them will not protect someone from the health effects of the rest of his or her lifestyle.”

Personally I believe the study, which was conducted over an extended time period, involved a wide assortment of participants within the community. These participants bring with them a range of factors, that weren’t measured by the analysis, which could have influenced their weight gain. Factors such as individual health, genetics, Raccoon Removal Cost, wealth, employment, stress and a range of other variables all could have impacted the participants weight gain, not the diet soda alone.

Regardless of the reason, the research still indicates that drinking diet soda results in weight gain. Is it conclusive? No! Is it something you should take under consideration when attempting to drop weight? Definitely?

Fundamentally my main issue with diet soda is, you do not know what the hell is inside. It tastes nice and is refreshing, but in it’s rawest form it’s a whole lot of chemicals which have been carefully blended to make a beverage that has zero nutritional value.

Common sense tells us that placing unnatural chemicals in our body on a regular basis isn’t a healthy practice. Imagine what it is doing to your insides!

Diet versions of sodas are a better option if you are attempting to drop weight, however it is still unnatural and studies are showing that, whilst we are not certain why, folks are still gaining weight intensive diet soda.

Does that mean that a can of diet soda every now and then will derail your weight loss plan? No. But what it does mean is, if you are drinking diet pop everyday, believing that you’re choosing the healthier option, you are mistaken. You are consuming far too many substances for my liking.

In a perfect world I should be telling you to not drink soda all together. Why? Because I’m not perfect, I enjoy a social drink and I choose to use diet soda as my mixer. I consider diet pop to be the lower of the two evils.

What I can say, is I drink diet soda during the day. If you’re drinking diet soda regular look at cutting back, especially if you’re drinking it to quench your thirst.