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I’ve known friends, when I asked them how they lost weight, just simply say, “I stopped drinking soda”.
At first I was surprised not consuming one thing could lead to weight loss! They weren’t doing much with the rest of their diet. Just stopped drinking soda cold turkey. After many years, now I realize it’s such a simple way to lose weight.
Think about the calorie content alone. One can (12 oz.) of regular Coke has 143 calories. Just drinking two per day for a whole year would equal to 34 extra pounds!!
It’s a known fact that soda has a correlation with obesity. Kids drink the stuff like it’s water and we wonder why kids are more overweight now than ever before. The same can be said with teens and adults. It’s not the only reason but it’s one of the main reasons.
There is one major reason why drinking soda is bad for you.
High Fructose Corn Syrup
You may not be familiar with this but if you’re serious about losing weight, learn to avoid these four words. This type of sugar is man made, cheaper and sweeter than sugar. So food manufacturers love it because it gives them more profit. It’s in almost everything you eat.
The reason it is so bad is because it’s packed with calories (bad) but these calories your body doesn’t recognize (really bad!).
HFCS screws up your body and shuts off your body’s natural appetite signals so you can drink and drink and not feel full! Before HFCS was invented in the 1970’s, you couldn’t drink a 2 liter of soda. Your body would have felt full! Now because the appetite control switch doesn’t turn off, we feel like we can consume more. Now you know why some people drink 4 big cups of soda during dinner.
A Little Science Background
The fructose, a sugar that occurs naturally in fruit and honey, isn’t used as an immediate form of energy. Glucose, on the other hand, is burned as an immediate source of energy, stored in your liver or muscles to use later, or as a last resort, turned into fat. It’s found in rice, pasta, grains, fruits, potatoes and a few veggies.
The corn syrup in HFCS is primarily glucose so it isn’t the problem. However, it’s not that sweet so that’s why HFCS has become so popular. It’s cheap and extra sweet! More profit but the big companies. They aren’t looking out for our health.
A little bit of fructose you get from honey and fruit won’t make you fast but eating HFCS is like having an IV directly injecting fat into your body. Do you want to do that? If you drink soda, you do already!
President Obama has talked about taxing sodas and said, ”Every study that’s been done about obesity shows that there is as high a correlation between increased soda consumption and obesity as just about anything else,”
After what you have read what HFCS does, does it make you think twice about consuming it?
How You Can Avoid HFCS
The obvious is don’t drink any soda. Soda is worst culprit. I can’t stress that enough! It tastes good and when we drink it, we can’t stop. Combine that with the addictive nature of caffeine in it and it’s double trouble for our body!
HFCS is not only in soda. Some breads have it, yogurt, cereals, pasta sauce, energy bars and even frozen yogurt to name some things!
This is when you need to look at the nutritional label. Labels list the ingredients from the most to the least. If HFCS is listed first or second, look at the chart below to see how much sugar the food contains. If it’s a gram or two, then it’s not a big deal. However if it’s 8 grams or more and it’s listed towards the top of the list, stay away from it like a bad date!!
Choose fresh fruit rather than fruit juice or fruit-flavored drinks. Even 100 percent fruit juice has a high concentration of sugar. Choose fruit canned in its own juices instead of heavy syrup. Keep it natural.
In Conclusion
Personally I have stopped drinking soda on a regular basis. When I was at my heaviest, I remember I had at least a Mountain Dew or Coke once a day. Sometimes two glasses. It tasted good!
Once I start training for my 10K, eat healthy, and lose weight, I stopped drinking soda. That was two years ago. I don’t have cravings for it anymore. For me to stop, it was easy. That doesn’t mean once in awhile I won’t have a Coke but I would say it’s probably once every 2-3 months.
How much soda do you consume? Do you think you could stop drinking it? Does reading this affect your opinion on drinking soda? Please share!
