Does water make you lose weight ?
The majority of diets and those who prescribe them emphasize the importance of water in a healthy diet .
Does water make you lose weight ?
The answer is clearly negative: if it were positive, we would burn additional calories with every glass of water we sip . This, obviously, does not happen, because if on the one hand water does not provide energy, on the other it has no intrinsic ability to increase the body’s metabolism , as instead nerve foods such as tea and coffee do .
Drinking excessive amounts of water in the hope of losing weight can even be a dangerous practice for your health. Forcing yourself to drink more during meals, for example, “extinguishes the fire with which food burns” (slows down and impairs digestion , excessively diluting digestive juices). Water, once absorbed at the intestinal level, ends up in the blood, regulating its volume; if we drink too much, therefore, the plasma volume increases and with it the blood pressure . Finally, the excessive dilution of electrolytes , in particular of sodium (people who love waters that are low in sodium should keep this in mind ), can be very dangerous and even lethal in extreme cases.
Does drinking water help you lose weight?
In this case the answer can become positive based on some considerations. Let’s see them in detail.
If water is drunk instead of alcohol , fruit juices , sweetened drinks, etc., the lower calorie intake can only help with weight loss.
In people who drink little, and there are many of them, it can happen that a need for water is confused with a need for food; It seems like nonsense but there is a grain of truth, since foods contain a certain percentage of water (close to 80-90% in most fresh vegetables and fruit ).
Drinking ice-cold water, in theory, can help you lose a few more calories, but this is obviously a very dangerous and not recommended practice.
Drinking one or two glasses of water before meals helps to stimulate the feeling of satiety , reducing the amount of food ingested.
Does drinking a little make you gain weight?
There may be a grain of truth in this case too. We know, for example, that adipose tissue is very poor in water, whereas muscle tissue is abundant; It is no coincidence that obese subjects have a lower percentage of body water than lean ones . Even the synthesis of glycogen , unlike lipogenesis , requires considerable quantities of water, since each gram of this polysaccharide binds almost 3 grams of it.
In athletes involved in endurance sports , the lack of water favors muscle catabolism , with an inevitable decrease in metabolism ( cortisol , the stress hormone , has antidiuretic activity and its secretion increases in water deficiency; at the same time, dehydration reduces the secretion of testosterone )*.
Furthermore, correct water intake promotes the elimination of toxins from the body, which by virtue of their lipophilicity tend to accumulate in adipose tissue. An excess of toxins in circulation due to reduced water intake could therefore have a fattening effect, as well as being decidedly unhealthy.
Even if our body has extremely effective mechanisms to regulate water losses according to intake, drinking in the right quantities is very important. Rather than doing it in the hope of losing weight, therefore, it makes more sense to drink to feel good and avoid all the unpleasant consequences of dehydration.
