Give Up Sugar Drinks [Challenge]

Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 3m 715 #nosugar

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Challenge of the Week: Give Up Sugary Soda Drinks

If you are struggling to lose weight, you might not understand the reasons why, but you are consuming them everyday without noticing the extra pounds packing on. Most people think that “drinking” something constitutes as a drink. Unfortunately, anything that is not water is food. Water is the only drink in the world that has no calories and is considered a drink.

If you have been putting pounds on over the years and cannot understand why, or worse, haven’t even noticed, or ignored it, blaming it on age, metabolism, or stress, than you need to come to terms with one of the real problems: what are you drinking?

Sugar is the biggest cause of weight gain in most of us because our bodies convert the excess of what is not used into fat. Sugar is in just about everything we drink and in many of our sweets. While sugar certainly tastes delicious, it has done nothing good for our bodies.

A can of soda has 10-12 teaspoons or about 3 tablespoons of sugar. This equates to about 35 pounds a year in sugar that you are consuming. Considering that your body uses some of that, you will not see a 35 pound weight gain, but instead, you will probably see about a 10 pound weight gain for every year that you continue to consume just 1 can of soda per day. Add in several cans a day and you can now figure out where the extra weight is coming from.

If you are a coffee drink and need a ton of milk and sugar in your coffee, and you drink several cups of coffee a day, than you have found a major culprit in your diet that is causing you to gain weight, slowly, but surely. Switch to Splenda, Truvia, Fruit of the Monk, or Stevia and as a milk alternative, switch to heavy cream, which contains no sugar at all.

Not only are you consuming these cans of soda or sugary drinks everyday, but if you are a fan of sweets, candy bars, ice cream, or anything else that would be considered a snack, the weight will just continue to pack on. You claim that you want to lose weight but if you continue to drink any drinks that contain sugar, you are losing the battle, and you will never win the war. You cannot possibly stand a chance.

If you are addicted to soda, you will want to try and reduce it to a can every other day, switch to diet soda, or look for an alternative powder mix, such as True Lemon or Crystal Light, which you mix into cold water, and it will taste just as sweet as a sugary drink. True Lemon offers crystallized lemon, which is frozen powdered lemon, that tastes like water with lemon in it that you order at a restaurant. Crystal Light comes in a variety of different flavors and is one of the first and oldest companies to have started the trend towards safer sugarless drinks.

While there have been plenty of articles written about drink alternative-to-sugar drinks, some of which advocate for it, and others that believe they are just as unhealthy, drink mixes such as Stevia, Truvia, Splenda, Fruit of the Monk, Sucralose, and Aspertame are probably a healthier sugar alternative.  This does not mean you should never drink water, but it does help to have a sweeter alternative.

If you want to begin your path to a healthy lifestyle and lose weight, you will have to begin by giving up your addiction to soda, sugary drinks, and sugar in general. There is a world of alternative ingredients that are just as sweet, if not sweeter than sugar, and healthier for you, that will not cause any weight gain, and can be used in baking, cooking, and drinks.

Your challenge this week is to test yourself by switching to something other than soda, sugar drinks, and to consume less sugar in your diet. Drink more water, drink alternative sweet drinks that contain zero calories and zero sugar. If you continue to do this for a month, you should start to notice weight loss, a return to your natural body balance and metabolism, and should notice no decrease in energy.

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