Should you swap your soft drink for diet soft drink or water? -

A recent study followed 300 people for 12 weeks.

They were all soft drink lovers who wanted to lose weight.

They split the group in two.
One group replaced their soft drinks with water and the other group replaced their soft drink with diet soft drink.

Which group do you think lost the most weight and WHY??

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**Note – the WHY part of the answer is the most important part.

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Weight loss results were as follows.

The group that switched to diet soft drink lost 13 pounds
The group that switched to water lost 9 pounds.

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Wait, What?

Haven’t we always heard that diet soft drink won’t help with weight loss goals?

Below is a quote from the article to help determine WHY.

“Dr. Jim Hill, who helped author the study, brought up an interesting explanation for why the diet-soda group lost more weight. “The most likely explanation was that having access to drinks with sweet taste helps the (artificially sweetened beverage) group to adhere better to the behavioral change program,” said Hill. He acknowledged that the diet soda itself wasn’t responsible for the additional 4 pounds.

In other words, the diet-soda drinking group didn’t have to make as many changes or practice quite as much willpower as the water only group. They could have had an easier time overall in focusing on calorie reduction or regular exercise knowing that they could have diet soda. The water group didn’t have this vice to fall back on, making it more difficult to adhere to all of the other healthy habits, like food logging and regular exercise, they did during the study”

Here are the lessons I took away from the study

Lesson 1

Weight loss and health are two different goals.

Your goal can and should be to attain them both. But don’t assume that they are the same thing. Weight loss is a matter of burning up more calories than you consume – that works even if that energy source is a crappy one. On the other hand you can choose very healthy foods and still put on weight, if you eat a little bit more than you need each day.

Also see

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Lesson 2

Be a sceptic and always ask WHY.

The more sceptical we can be, the more we ask the WHY from the experts and the studies, the better off we will all be. Look for the lessons behind the actions, not just the headlines.

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Lesson 3

The diets with the biggest success rate are the ones with the LEAST disruption to your current lifestyle.

We only get so much Will-power to use each day and each week. If we have to use that will power for LOTs of radical changes, we are bound to run out sooner rather than later. This is what happened to the water drinking group. They used all of their will-power up in that big change. They (most likely) ended up snacking on other high calorie foods, because they had no willpower left.

The big take away lesson here is NOT that we all need to switch to diet soft drinks, but that we need to make SMALL realistic changes over time for long term health and weight loss success. If someone usually drinks 5 cans of soft drink per day, my advice to that person would be to switch just 1 of those to water. Master this for a week or so, until it feels normal and you are not relying on will-power. Then switch another can of soft-drink to water. Repeat until you are at just one can per day or none.

Trying to go from ZERO to HERO (as so many dieters do) is a recipe for disaster.

I bang on about this ALL THE TIME to my coaching clients

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Lesson 4

Never believe the head line of a study. ANY study.

If you saw only the headline of this study, you might be led to believe that diet soft drinks actually had some ingredients that help you lose weight. When you look further into the study, you can see that this is not true and numerous other factors are at play. This is very true for a LOT of studies that I see in the media. Particularly where weight loss and health are concerned.

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Lastly

I am NOT implying that diet soft drink is a healthier choice than water.

The reason I found this study so fascinating was because I what I learnt about will-power and making small realistic changes instead of trying to be perfect.

This study may also be of interest to anyone interested in learning more about diet drinks and weight loss.

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** Hey, if you find this information useful, it would be great if you could share it with your friends.

Thanks all.

Chriss.

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Disclaimer

I think we all agree and know that that diet drinks contain are not as healthy as water and should be kept to a minimum.

None the less, I found the study fascinating for many reasons. I am writing about this to share the lessons that I learnt from the study itself. NOT to tell people to drink diet soft drink instead of water.

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More information on the actual study can be found here http://www.marketwatch.com/story/should-you-swap-your-h20-for-diet-pop-2014-06-10