Liquid Calories Re-visited

Back when I was in high school, I worked at a grocery store stocking groceries, cleaning out meat coolers, and bagging groceries for customers.



I still remember one gentleman (who was extremely overweight) who would stand at the checkout and had every high calorie food there was in the place. Sugar cereal, candy, pies, anything you could imagine. Then the last thing he would take out of his cart was a 12 pack of DIET Coke. I always remember laughing thinking, "Oh, I guess the Diet Coke equals it all out."

But I came across this story that made me think a little more.

I've written in the past here on how easy it is to consume a high amount of calories just from one bottle of regular soda. Without even thinking twice, people are putting between 200-300 calories in their bodies from a 20 oz bottle of regular soda.

This article talks about how if someone simply eliminate that regular soda (and keep eating the rest of their crappy diet), they could stabilize or lose weight.

I was a little disappointed though in the article when it gave the results of how much weight was actually lost:

The specific results:

* A reduction in liquid calorie intake was associated with a weight loss of 0.55 pounds (0.25 kg) at 6 months and 0.52 pounds (0.24 kg) at 18 months.
* Among sugar-sweetened beverages, a reduction of 1 serving daily was associated with a weight loss of 1.1 pounds (0.5 kg) at 6 months and 1.54 pounds (0.7 kg) at 18 months.
* Of the seven types of drinks examined, sugar-sweetened beverages were the only type significantly associated with weight change.
* At 37 percent, sugar-sweetened beverages were the leading source of liquid calories.

Losing less than two pounds over a period of 18 months doesn't seem all that big of a deal to me.

But I think the argument still holds that I mentioned back in this post that if you simply drop your regular soda intake (especially if you're consuming more than 2 a day) over time those eliminated calories will add up to less pounds around your waistline.

But maybe another benefit of dropping those liquid calories is that you're not priming your body for more sweet tasting foods. In other words, maybe it needs to be researched whether drinking regular soda then also leads you to crave the sweeter foods that also happen to be the high calories garbage that is out there.

In the end, I might have been laughing at the guy at the counter buying all the high calorie food to go along with his Diet Coke but, in a way, at least he wasn't consuming as many calories as he could have.

www.leanbodyfitness.com
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