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A new study has discovered a powerful weapon that helps you lose more weight – drinking a 500 ml bottle of water before your meals.
Obesity has been one of the main health concerns in the United States for several centuries, and recent studies have shown that the issues is spreading worldwide as fast food products are becoming more and more popular despite being well known for being unhealthy.
But British researches may have found a way to potentially repair the situation. According to them, simply drinking a 500 ml bottle of water 30 minutes (half an hour) before each meal helps obese adults lose more weigh than they normally would.
Dr. Helen Parretti, study author and field expert from the University of Birmingham (the United Kingdom), gave a statement stressing that the beauty of the discovery lies in its simplicity. She said that “Just drinking a pint of water, three times a day, before your main meals may help reduce your weight”.
Health experts have credit water with many health benefits over the course of the years – it keeps people hydrated and prevents them from fainting during the summer months, it helps digestion, it regulates body temperature, it transports oxygen and nutrients to cells, it cleans the body of toxins, it lubricates joints and it protects the body tissue and organs.
On top of this, a slightly older study conducted in 2013 has found that people can boost their brain performance before starting a mental task by just drinking water.
For the new study, Dr. Parretti and her colleagues recruited 84 obese adults and randomly assigned them to one of the following groups: subjects who were required to drink 500 ml of plain water 30 minutes before each of their meals (the researchers referred to this process as “preloading”) on a daily basis for 12 weeks, and subjects who acted as a control group and were simply told to imagine that their stomachs were full before starting each of their meals.
All of the subjects were given weight management consultations where experts informed them on what to do to improve their physical activity levels and their diet. They also got a follow-up phone consultation two (2) weeks after the initial one.
When the research team compared the results, they noticed that, on average, the subjects who drank 500 ml of water before each meal lost and an additional 2.87 Ibs (1.3 kg), compared to subjects who simply imagined that their stomachs were full.
The subjects in the first group generally lost about 9.48 Ibs (4.3 kg) during the above mentioned 12 weeks, whereas the subjects in the second group generally lost about 1.76 Ibs (0.8 kg) during the same period of time.
Dr. Parretti pointed out that the study was not designed to reveal why exactly drinking water helps people lose more weigh, however she has a few theories.
One possible explanation is that “drinking water increases your metabolic rate temporarily” and another is that water “makes you feel fuller so you then eat less at mealtimes”.
She and her colleagues stressed that their study has value because it offers preliminary evidence that consuming water before each meal can help obese adults lose weight.
The findings were published recently, in the journal Obesity.
Image Source: pixabay.com
