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8 Tips to Lose Weight Easily
Just Cut out Soda and Sugary Drinks
By Connie Bennett
Soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks are on my mind lately. Not because I drink them myself, but because just cutting out the non-nutritive, sugar-filled, potentially harmful beverages is a highly effective way – if not the most easy way – to lose weight and improve your health.
That's right. Just making that one simple diet change – removing chemically created soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks such as sports drinks and juice drinks – could enable you to peel off the pounds, possibly to the tune of 15 pounds in one year.
In fact, a recent scientific review published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition pointed out that a mere 12 ounces of sugar-laced soda a day could pile on 15 pounds in a year.
The most popular soft drink sold nowadays is a 20-ounce bottle or can, which comes to 250 unnecessary calories and about 16.87 teaspoons of sugar. (Usually, you'll be getting high fructose corn syrup, which some researchers now finger as a leading cause of obesity and other health woes.)
Bear in mind that I'm not even talking about those popular 42-ounce soft drinks promoted at some fast food restaurants and many convenience stores. If you order one of these gargantuan drinks, you'll get about 410 calories and around 35.28 teaspoons of sugar.
It's also well known that if you drink soft drinks, you just don't get full or satisfied the way you would from regular food so you may end up overeating and packing in more extra calories. (Incidentally, diet drinks aren't any better. Some studies even suggest that the sweet taste in an artificially sweetened soft drink could trigger sugar cravings and lead to weight gain, too.)