The Water Diet

A Cheap Way to Lose Weight

I lost 50 pounds on this diet. When I lost that much, I exercised more, ate slightly healthier, and had a mindset which demanded change. But none of these healthful habits were new to me. The main influence in slimming down was one simple addition to the way I ate: I began pausing between mouthfuls in order to drink a gulp of water.

The idea is simple: replace what would gain you weight in the long run with what will not, i.e., something that, when in excess, the body naturally pees out. Most of us eat too much food. What is too much? Too much is eating when not hungry; too much is eating when full, when you’re burping (resulting from gas escaping a peristaltic, and stuffed, belly) and still gagging down another morsel. Studies show Americans on average eat too much (for example, “A study at Rutgers University supports earlier research that people today eat bigger servings than they did 20 years ago,” which is significant since “an extra 10 calories per day translates to one pound gained per year,” according to Lisa Drayer, a registered dietitian), but these studies are of populations, not you. Only you (and maybe your therapist!) know whether you’re eating too much. And when you are, the excess food glues to your body. It stays. It squats. It expands you. The body does discharge some of it. But the rest stays to ruin your health. Excess water, on the hand, is entirely expelled. Why that is is not as important as that it is true. (But for an explanation, begin with Wikipedia’s article on body water.) The point is that the extra water you drink during a meal displaces the space in the digestive system that would be occupied by too much food. Rather than barnacling superfluously, water drains away. So in the long run you’re eating less, peeing more, and slimming down.

Changing What You Eat? Go ahead.

A warning: Sodas, deserts, a surfeit of meat–the water diet won’t change the nature of these foods; it will do nothing more than help you eat less of them. The water diet’s aim is to help segue you from one lifestyle to another by limiting the ill-effects of succumbing to temptation; resisting unhealthful temptation is still up to you.

Grazing

The rule applies any time you eat. Chewing on bubble gum? Drink water. One bite of pie? Begin and finish it gulping H2O. Whether you graze or not, continue practicing the diet’s rhythm. If you’re going to nibble, chug water with it. Creeping to  the fridge in the starving night, no one else awake, you dip at leftovers, you snack, and another thing awakens:  the one basic rule—began and end that snack with lots of water!

Signs of Overeating

Of all (legal) indulgences, eating may be the quickest to backfire. One too many bites and you feel awful−at least I do. Yet I found that I could not eat less. No matter how hard I tried to slim down by skimping on extras, cutting portions, or missing meals, I could not help but sneak in food elsewhere. Or, worse, give up and gorge.

Changing how much one eats is harder than changing what one eats. I’m asking you to do neither. Eat what you’ve always eaten. Eat as much as you’ve always eaten. You’ll get what you want, the meat, the dressings, the white bread, but you’ll find that when your eating is segmented between gulps of water, you won’t finish as much overall. Again, this diet is designed as a supplement to a change in the nature of your food. If you want to learn what to eat, look elsewhere; if you want to eat less, practice the water diet.

Response to Concerns

• Drinking more and eating less will lead to feeling hungrier sooner. Rather than lose weight, you’ll maintain your weight or gain more through snacking.

Not true. If you get hungry soon after finishing a meal, jonesing to nibble on something succulent, reach for water. Filling up on that rather than leftovers will sate your hunger just as well.

• How do I know whether I’m drinking too much water or eating too little food?

Listen to your body; you’ll know. The rule is intended to segue you from eating too much to eating just right, not to starve you. When you feel good, you’ve eaten enough; when you feel empty, vapid, enervated, you haven’t. If those adjectives aren’t scientific enough for you, you could calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate, the total calories your body needs per day when you do nothing but lie down. The first website I searched for to find a solid automatic calculator is a bit odd, but, despite the gaffs in grammar, it sums up how to determine how many calories you should eat each day.

• Too much water can poison.

True, and this article has a good discussion of why water can poison and how to avoid it. There are two key ideas for us: one, water poisoning is rare even among athletes, who are most susceptible; and two, it is better to avoid dehydration than water poisoning. The water diet replaces one kind of intake with another, from food to water; so theoretically you won’t imbibe enough water to risk injury, if only because you’ll ingest about the same amount of stuff as before, but now in the form of water.

• What about “water-weight,” the short-term increase in weight due to water?

Fewy. What about it? We’re talking vision here, not myopia. Think of who you will be in a few months, not in the few hours before you pee all that “water-weight” away.

• Replacing food with water is not a one-to-one ratio, since I can drink more than I eat.

Good for you. Even if the ratio is two-to-one (water-to-food), you’ll still eat less and pee the inundation away.

Conclusion

The water diet is not a lot of things: it’s not a panacea or a training course; it’s not going to condition your abs, or track your caloric intake. But it will help you eat less, buy fewer sodas, pace your eating, and, in the end, lose weight.

Simple, free, with nothing to scribble on a daily journal or receive from a mail-in supplier, the water diet does nothing more nor less than use an essential ingredient of life to guide you to a new way of living it.