You eat healthy and not too much. Still, you don't lose weight. Then this is a question that you may be overlooking:do you also drink healthy?
Not only food influences your weight and your health, your drinking behavior also counts. The drinks you knock down in a day can have a big effect on how you feel and whether you can still fit in your pants. Without realizing it, you can take in a lot of calories and unhealthy nutrients from a few glasses. A waste of your healthy eating pattern.
Drinking has two purposes:on the one hand it regulates your moisture balance, on the other it supplies certain substances to your body. For a healthy fluid balance you need an average of one and a half to two liters of fluid a day. Your body loses a lot of fluids just by breathing, sweating and going to the toilet. To supplement this, it is important that you drink enough. The first signal that your body is not getting enough fluids is that you will urinate less. If the moisture deficiency lasts for a long time, you slowly start to dry out. More and more, until you get symptoms. You will feel drowsy, your skin will become less elastic. Drinking is especially important if you exercise intensively or in hot weather. Then you lose moisture even faster.
Moisture is vital for a healthy body. But what are the most sensible choices if you want to lose weight? There is really no need to just drink water. Other drinks also count for the supply of moisture.
Water is healthy because it is low in calories, which is beneficial for the line. In addition, water does not contain any unfavorable substances such as added sugars. But water also contains no substances that your body can use. Water is neutral; coffee and tea, on the other hand, are plant products that contain bioactive substances and are useful. When you drink coffee or tea, you get extra healthy nutrients in addition to moisture. Coffee and tea contain polyphenols, which are substances that can be good for your blood vessels or that can protect against diabetes. And they contain caffeine, which increases concentration.
The Health Council also refers to coffee and tea as healthy drinks. Three to six cups of coffee or tea a day is an excellent choice. With coffee, however, you should make sure that it is filtered coffee, from a device with a paper filter. Coffee from the percolator, an espresso machine or cups is less healthy, because it contains fatty substances that you cannot catch with a machine without a filter. If you ingest these substances, the risk of elevated cholesterol increases. Even if it is only in small quantities. You can of course make coffee and tea unhealthier yourself by adding sugar and bad types of milk powder. It's about black coffee and green tea when it comes to healthy drinks.
There are also negative stories about coffee and tea, for example they have a diuretic or constipating effect. Caffeine in coffee and tea stimulates your bladder a bit, making you have to go to the toilet faster. But you don't lose any more moisture through them and they don't dry you out either. You can suffer from caffeine, because not all people break it down as quickly. People who spend longer with caffeine in their blood can become a bit overstimulated. They may feel agitated or have trouble sleeping. With how many cups of coffee or tea this effect occurs, differs per person. Tea contains less caffeine. Some people definitely don't want to drink coffee before going to bed and therefore make a pot of tea, but with a few cups of black tea you get the same amount of caffeine.
It is healthier to simply eat fruit out of hand. Fruit juices are high in sugar and they are quick calories. They are also not very satiating. If you eat the fruit yourself, at least your body still has work to chew, digest the fiber, and so on. As a result, you eat a lot of it less quickly, which is ultimately better for your body weight. Many fruit juices, fresh or not fresh, actually fall into the soft drinks category, which is a less healthy choice than water, coffee or tea.
Energy drinks provide a lot of empty calories. Most varieties contain a lot of sugars. The caffeine boost doesn't do anything special for your health either. You are extra alert, which can be an advantage when you have to concentrate. But that effect is short-term, in the long term an energy drink does nothing for you at all. Always check the label to see what you are actually ingesting.
Have fruit juice, energy drinks or soda whenever you feel like it. But make the choice consciously, especially if you want to lose weight. It is a shame if you unnoticed take in more calories than you think and thus mess up your weight loss attempt.
Text:Loes van de Mosselaar | Image:Shutterstock
