My buddy, came to me a while back looking for advice on how to banish the bulging jelly-belly he had acquired in his later years. I skipped the diet lecture and instead gave him some advice I had once gotten: Review your calorie intake, starting with the liquids you consume.
A few months later, having adopted the simple food swap philosophy and dramatically altered his calorie intake without giving up the foods and drinks he loves, he was rewarded by dropping 25 pounds and three inches off of his waistline—in around six weeks!
It helped to start with beverages because between soda, coffee drinks, smoothies, and booze, he was sipping away more than a quarter of his daily calories. A study from the University of North Carolina found that we consume 450 calories a day from beverages, nearly twice as many as 30 years ago! This increase amounts to an extra 23 pounds a year that we're forced to work off—or carry around with us.
There’s good news and bad news when it comes to liquid calories. The bad news is they are the most difficult calories for us to gauge, because we have none of the greasy, cheesy visual cues we get when we go face-to-face with a plate of loaded nachos or a triple cheeseburger. The good news is that they are the easiest calories to cut from your diet.
Try to identify the most bloating beverages in gas stations, bars, smoothie counters, and coffee shops across America and replaced them with sensible and satisfying stand-ins for a fraction of the caloric cost. So you can sip what you want, skip the diet, and still lose lots of weight this year.
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