Sweet Tea Sabotaging your Weight Goal!

From Jordan Rubin's Desk: I couldnt have said it better!

The same goes for slurping specialty coffees, sports drinks, fruit punch, and sodas. You can cut back on doughnuts and sweets in the break room, but if you’re sipping sweetened ice tea throughout the day, you’re moving further away from your perfect weight.

Let’s say you drink a 20-ounce serving of sweet tea, which is the summer beverage of choice in the Southeast where I live. Bingo, you’ve just consumed 240 calories—the same as cola. Some people drink sweet tea by the gallon, unaware that they’re ingesting nearly 1,500 calories a day that way!

Then there are the sugar-and-salt cocktails like Gatorade, which commands 80 to 90 percent of the sports drink market in America. As someone who attended Florida State University, I’ll be upfront about this: My feelings about Gatorade aren’t derived from the fact that this sports drink was invented at my rival school, the University of Florida, and was named after the Gator football team. I’d be saying the same thing if this stuff was called “Seminolade.”

My gripe with Gatorade is that it’s a combination of non-purified water, sucrose, glucose, fructose (which are nothing more than sugars), and artificial colors with some potassium and sodium (the “electrolytes”) thrown into the mix. In other words, Gatorade is artificially colored and flavored sugar water with a salty aftertaste. Contrary to their claims, I believe Gatorade and other power drinks do more harm than good. It would be better during workouts to consume natural mineral or spring water.

I’m also not a big fan of “fitness waters” like Propel, which, interestingly, was created by the makers of Gatorade. Propel is your basic H20 with four B vitamins and two antioxidants (vitamins C and E) added in various flavors: lemon, orange, and berry.

In case you’re wondering how a manufacturer can pour additives into water and still call it “water,” the International Bottled Water Association (yes, there is one) decided that if the additives don’t add up to more than 1 percent by weight of the final product, then it can still be sold as “water.” I’m still shaking my head how a product with four grams of sugar in each bottle gets to stand on the same shelf as bottled water, but that’s America for you. When it comes to something as basic as water, you should accept no imitations. I hate to see such a wonderfully healthy resource perverted, so to speak, to satisfy our taste buds.

Water is an overlooked resource by those seeking to lose weight. Many times dieters, I’ve found, confuse hunger and thirst. They think they’re hungry when actually they’re dehydrated. Drinking fluids will not only hydrate the body for all the good reasons I’ve just described, but it will put a damper on those hunger pains coming from the pit of the stomach.

A good rule of thumb is to drink a half-ounce of water daily for every pound you weigh. In other words, if you weigh 200 pounds, then try to drink 100 ounces of water throughout the day, which is around 12 glasses.

If you’re trying to reach your perfect weight and get hungry, drink an eight-ounce glass of water. You also find that drinking a glass a half hour before lunch or dinner will act like a governor on an engine, taking the edge off your hunger pangs and preventing you from raiding the fridge or pillaging the pantry.

Copyright ©2008 Jordan Rubin