If you stumbled across this article, you are probably trying to lose some weight.
If I were to guess, you probably don’t drink enough water daily, too.
If I told you the easiest way to lose weight is by drinking more water, would you believe me? Stick around and I’ll explain why…
To give you an idea who I am (prior to losing this recent weight), I’m 6 feet tall and weigh 210 pounds. My ideal weight is around 190 pounds, but I fell off the wagon after having kids and completely stopped working out for about 3 years now. I’ll do some pushups and situps every now and then, but for the most part, I don’t take time out of my day for exercise.
Of course, Covid didn’t help my unhealthy routine either. I work from home now and can definitely tell that I have much less active than when I had a commute.
I would try to get in the mindset of working out more as well as experimenting with different diets. I finally made the decision to drink more water so I wouldn’t have the urge to overeat.
Drinking More Water Helps Overeaters
Lately, I have had tendencies of stressing out about work and general life events in my life. 99% of the time, any stress I have will cause me to eat everything in sight.
In addition to stress, food alone is definitely my biggest weakness. If you give me a family-size bag of Cheetos, I can easily eat the whole in one sitting. That’s why I can’t buy any family-size chip bags anymore. Pizza is just as bad. I’ll be full after a few slices, but my mind will say, “You can have a couple more”.
Drinking water is one of the best ways to stop overeating because your stomach has a limited capacity. You can either fill up your stomach with water or food. If you fill up on mostly water, you will naturally eat less food, period.
Why I Previously Failed The ‘Drink More Water’ Diet
I’ve tried losing weight by drinking more water multiple times and each time previously, I failed.
Here were the problems with my first attempts:
- I wasn’t strict enough during the process
- Mentally, I labeled this diet as ‘easy’
- I wouldn’t drink enough water
- I wouldn’t have structure to my eating habits
When I tried this a few months back, I would drink various amounts of water and I wasn’t consistent. This made it easy for me to lose focus and not get enough water intake during the day.
I would also have a mindset that this diet was easy, when in reality, it wasn’t. Keep in mind, the ‘drink more water’ diet doesn’t have to be hard either. It really takes commitment and determination for a few moments each day.
How To Plan For A Successful Diet
Committing, planning, and consistency are the 3 main factors needed for a successful diet.
After failing to follow through with this diet in the past, I made sure to create a fail-proof plan for this go around. Here are the parameters I chose for the new diet:
- Drink 32 ounces of water when waking up in the morning
- Drink 32 ounces of water before each meal (or snack)
- When I don’t want to drink water, remind myself it only takes 2 minutes
- Don’t graze on food in the kitchen, but make a plate and sit down while eating.
Committing to these 4 rules, was the key to a successful diet. If you think about it, these aren’t hard tasks whatsoever. The hard part is staying consistent while getting bored of drinking water every day.
When my mind would tell me “I don’t want to drink water right now”, I would just respond back by saying “I could drink this water, or I could run a mile”. If I compare a high-intensity workout to drinking a few cups of water, it becomes easier to motivate myself to stay committed to the original plan.
I also realized that I needed to have a better strategy to consuming food. Snacking throughout the day (or for hours at a time) is one of the easiest ways to gain unwanted weight. I decided to cut the grazing out from my diet and this helped me with portion control and eliminated overeating.
Benefits of the ‘Drink More Water’ Diet
It has been 2 weeks since I started this new diet and I am very happy with the results so far.
When I started this diet, my main goal was to obviously lose weight. Here are the total benefits I found from drinking more water throughout the day:
Weight Loss
I weighed 210 pounds before starting this diet and was expecting to lose 5 pounds or so. After 2 weeks of drinking more water, my weight dropped to 202 pounds. I was happy to see that water alone could help me lose 8 pounds and I’m definitely going to continue this diet for as long as I can.
Higher Energy Levels
Before starting this diet, I would wake up around 6:30am each day and would struggle to stay awake after 9:00pm. In my typical evening routine, I would put my daughter to bed around 8:30pm and half the time I would fall asleep during this process. After a few days on this diet, I wouldn’t feel exhausted in the evenings anymore.
I also remember going up the stairs and I would think to myself, “this is so easy”. Drinking water would help me with all physical tasks without depleting my energy level.
Fewer Headaches
I tend to get headaches quite often. I’ve always thought this was from staring at a computer screen all day at work, but now I’m not so sure.
Drinking an ample amount of water can definitely help your body avoid dehydration, which will prevent headaches. I don’t have any data to back this up, but I’m highly confident that I had less headaches after switching my diet.
Feeling Healthier
Do you know that feeling you get when you are feeling at your best? It kind of reminds me of the character Bradley Cooper plays in the movie, Limitless. When he is ‘on his game’, he looks as if he can take on any challenge with ease.
If a plant doesn’t get enough water or sunlight, it starts to wither away. Humans are just the same and I can tell when my body feels withered or is lacking the right amount of nutrition.
My main goal with this new diet was to lose weight. Afterward, I realized feeling healthy again was what I really needed. I’ll take feeling healthy and husky over skinny and miserable any day.
Try The ‘Drink More Water Diet’
If you are looking to lose some weight and want to feel better each day, give this diet a shot. If you aren’t successful, the worst thing that happens is you drink a tad more water.
My guess is you’ll find a plethora of benefits and will learn new things about your body and your health.
I would suggest finding a partner to do this with since having an accountability partner will increase your chances of reaching your goals.
If you like this article or have any thoughts about drinking water to lose weight, give us a shout in the comments below!
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