By Tom Weede
What you drink can be just as important as your food choices when it comes to controlling your weight
You’ve started an exercise program, cut out the fast-food french fries and turned your fridge into a Häagen-Dazs-free zone. And yet those stubborn extra pounds just seem to stick around. Pondering your fate, you take a sip of sweet tea and try to figure things out.
Hold on. Sweet tea? Well, the answer to your dilemma may be in that delightful drink. In fact, when watching your waistline, what you drink can be just as important as what you eat, says Beth Kitchin, M.S., R.D., UAB nutritionist. “I’ve had clients who were drinking 48 to 64 ounces of regular soda a day,” she says. “And by making one change—substituting other, low-calorie beverages for the soda—they’ve lost a lot of weight.”
With solid food the focus of most weight-loss plans, we can forget that drinks contribute calories too. So it’s no surprise that beverages make up 21 percent of the total caloric intake for Americans, and between 1977 and 2001 the proportion of calories we consume from sweetened sodas and fruit drinks tripled.
Culprits by the Glassful
To combat the beverage binge, watch for drinks that come with hefty calorie counts but little nutritional value, Kitchin advises.
A good place to start: soda and alcohol. A 16-oz. regular cola, for example, sports 190 calories—about half of a typical meal. A 12-oz. beer has about 150 calories, and mixed drinks can be especially calorie dense because of added syrups.
And alcohol can have a still more surreptitious side effect if consumed at mealtime. “The more you drink, the less inhibited you become, and the less careful you are about how much you eat,” Kitchin explains.
But even beverages you may assume are reasonably healthy can sabotage weight-loss goals with extra calories. Drinking several glasses of sweet tea over lunch racks up 300 to 500 calories. Smoothies offer healthful amounts of fruit and other ingredients—but also can contain hundreds of calories.
Many chain restaurants have nutritional information online, so check their beverages—and find a lower-calorie option.
Less-Damaging Drinks
To improve your beverage habits, place a strong emphasis on water, and then consider other healthy choices. One-hundred percent fruit juice (as opposed to sweetened fruit drinks), for example, contains calories but offers beneficial nutrients. “Think of your calories as dollars,” Kitchin says. “With juice you’re getting a lot more bang for your buck. You’re getting potassium, folic acid and in some cases vitamin C. Juice is not nutritionally bereft like sodas.”
At the same time, simply replacing sodas with juice won’t foster weight loss—you’ll consume about the same number of calories.
So consider low-cal beverages such as flavored carbonated waters with a lime twist, or artificially sweetened drinks like Crystal Light. Most studies show that artificial sweeteners are relatively safe, Kitchin says, although she recommends moderation and varying the type of sweetener you consume. “That way you’re not overdoing any one particular artificial sweetener,” she says, “just in case they’re not as harmless as we think.”
Even caffeinated drinks can play a role. Unsweetened tea is calorie-free and supplies disease-fighting phytochemicals, Kitchin says. Coffee also has phytochemicals, and there’s some evidence that java may lower diabetes risk.
Kitchin recommends limiting caffeine intake to 200 milligrams (mg) or less a day, but use caution if you are sensitive to its stimulant effects or have a low calcium intake (caffeine can cause a loss of calcium from the body). A 5-oz. cup of coffee has around 100 to 120 mg of caffeine, while the same amount of tea has about 40 mg.
But beware of rich coffee drinks—a Starbucks 20-oz. Caffé Mocha Espresso has 490 calories, with 26 fat grams. Cut calories by downsizing, skipping the whipped cream and ordering nonfat milk (170 calories, 1.5 fat grams for 12 oz.).
Sports drinks such as Gatorade can rehydrate during strenuous activity and provide electrolytes lost from sweating. “But sports drinks still have calories,” Kitchin says. “So read the labels, because even though they don’t have as many calories as a soda, it still adds up.”