Gaining Weight? What are you Drinking?

Have you spent the summer exercising and eating right, but you are still gaining weight? The culprit could be not what you are eating, but what you are drinking. Even if you go into and manage to avoid the donuts, a small coffee with cream and sugar still has 120 calories. If you splurge on a large frozen coffee drink, you could be taking in a whopping 900 calories! 

When you drink your calories, your body does not register them the same way as if you ate solid food. And liquid calories do add up. Regular soda is the most obvious offender of unwanted calories. In fact many experts point to soda as a leading cause of obesity in America. Contrary to popular opinion, drinking diet soda does little to prevent weight gain. People tend to eat more when they drink diet soda to make up for all the calories they are "saving".

Some "all natural" fruit juices are, nutritionally speaking, not much better than soda. Fruit juice  labeled "all natural" could mean anything from freshly squeezed orange juice to a processed fruit drink loaded with empty calories. Even juicing your own fruit is not ideal because you lose all of the fiber in the juicing process. Eating whole fruit would be a much better choice. Plus it slows down your caloric intake. It takes a lot longer to eat, say, four oranges than to drink a cup of juice.

For me, coffee drinks, soda, fruit juice are all super easy to avoid. My summer downfall is the frozen cocktail or an ice cold beer or pitchers of white wine sangria. If I can't zip my wet suit next week for the TOBAY triathlon, I am certain it is my liquid refreshments to blame. Even my two drink maximum can add enough calories to my otherwise healthy diet to cause weight gain. Plus adding alcohol to the equation, often leads to poor food choices.

Once again, it all comes down to finding the right balance. If you are trying to lose weight without success, what you are drinking may be to blame.