Why Water Helps With Weight Loss
In this blog post, I want to talk about water and how it makes a huge difference for your weight loss. Drinking enough water or not drinking enough water can have a major impact on your results.
If you are interested in losing weight, i'm encouraging you to drink a ton of water.
You may be thinking, how does water make you lose weight? It's because of the effects water has on your body that people don't even think about. Water helps keep your organs, muscles and everything functional. Oxygen + water helps keep everything running smoothly. That includes your metabolism, digestion, immunity, clarity, appetite and more.
Water and the food you eat get broken down into nutrition and converted into plasma, which makes up a majority of the body. The majority of our body is plasma, and water weight.
Plasma in the body is what carries all of our nutrition and blood cells throughout our body in our veins.
When I am taking body measurements for my clients, we have the ability to measure weight, body fat, bone density, muscle mass and water weight. We do this before the workout and at the beginning of the program to ensure accurate results and track progress over time.
I can tell when someone's water weight is low or high and then I will begin to ask them questions to understand why their water weight is what it is. For women a healthy water weight is between 45%-60% and for men 50-65%. Lean body tissue has more water in it than fat. Men have the ability to fluctuate in weight easier than women do based on water weight alone.
There may be a few reasons why someones water weight is low:
1) High body fat %
2) Fasting
3) Exercise
4) Hormones
5) Weather
This just names a few reasons. I am sure there are more reasons why your water weight can be low.
Few reasons why someones water weight is high:
1) Excessive water retention from lifestyle choices
2) Lots of sodium in the body
3) Carbohydrates
4) Dehydration
5) Hormones
6) Medications
7) Weather
8) Fasting to much
As a kid/young adult I did not understand any of this. I always thought water was mostly all the same. Looking back on it I don't understand why I thought this way even at its most basic level.
If you're made up of majority of water, you want to be made up of high quality, clean, good water. You don't want to be made up of dirty, nasty water. And that includes food too. Food gets converted into water weight of your body. The quality of water will directly trickle into your everyday lifestyle. It will effect your habits, thought process, decision making, energy, mood and more.
Drinking more water allows you too have greater clarity & make better everyday decisions such as what foods you will eat.
If you're making better decisions then, you're doing better things for your body, career and relationships. The amount of water you drink indirectly effects the people around you.
Understanding this is important because you are made up of majority water.
When building muscle it can get messy on the inside of your body, and you need the water to flow the excess junk from building muscle out of the body. Another reason why water is so important to your goal of weight loss.
A good metaphor to help you understand is construction of buildings. In order to build that amazing building there is a lot of debris and trash that accumulates from the construction of the building. You then have people or services clear the debris in order to finalize the building. Muscle is similar to this. Having fine tuned, optimized, healthy muscle eats fat around the clock for you. Water helps to build the muscle, keep optimal bodily function possible and then water also helps flow all the waste from the muscles out of the body fast & efficiently.
Water is what helps flow all of the junk out of the body. The more water you drink, the faster the process goes in flushing out the excess garbage your body is capable of accumulating.
To come full circle here, if you're working out, eating enough protein, optimizing muscle, then the muscle is eating fat, and all that waste is being flushed out by the water. This entire process is going to help you lose weight.
By drinking enough water you might not even have to go on a diet to lose weight. This simple lifestyle choice can have a huge effect on your weight, energy and mood.
Rarely, do I encourage people to go on diets because most of the time people can get the results they want from simple, sustainable lifestyle habits.
Exercise more, drink more fluids BOOM. That is a great recipe for success right there.
Many people I talk to don't drink enough water and since our bodies are advanced you can feel normal without realizing you are actually dehydrated.
Our bodies are made up mostly of water! This is the fuel you need to rest better, decide when to wake up in the morning, when to go to bed at night, when to eat next, or when to stop eating.
When you're properly hydrated, you begin to think much more clearly. Thinking clearly will allow you to decide better quality options for breakfast, lunch and dinner which can effect how you feel and act through your day.
Another metaphor to help you understand, think of your body and drinking water as the flow of a river. Without rain, a river will dry up. The function of the environment around the river will begin to suffer, and inhibiting the natural flow of the environment. If there is no water in the river, is there a natural flow? No it is dried up.
Not drinking enough water is not correct and our bodies are not designed for this. So being dehydrated will not optimize the environment inside your body at a cellular level.
Drinking enough water, will help the natural flow of the body. You wont dry up or retain excessive water weight in order to "survive". Your brain will respond to lack of water as something going wrong and will store water weight as supplies for as long as needed/possible.
Another thing to understand that is important, is not overindulging in an excessive high salt diet. This will effect the amount of water weight you retain. Thus, keeping an unnecessary amounts of water weight in your body, but from the brains perspective it is doing what it has to do to function as best it can with the conditions it is in.
This then can lead you to being more frustrated and stressed out which also negatively effects your goals of trying to lose weight or tighten up. This is counterproductive to what you want to do and also unhealthy. Stressing out about this will also compound the effects of retaining water weight.
You want to drink a lot of water to encourage the flow of everything in your body. You consume salt of course but not an excessive amount. If you pay attention to this then water retention will begin to release.
If your body has an excessive amount of sodium in it from lifestyle choices, it's going to hold up that water weight and will show on the scale. If those are your goals then you will not be happy.
Drinking enough water helps suppress your excess hunger and kicks craving. One trick that I think is very useful is when you are hungry or craving something drink water! Grab a glass of water and chug it down. You'd be so surprised as to how effective this is to eliminating cravings.
So if you have that glass of water that prevents you from having that candy bar, then that just set you up for weight loss right there. Drinking water kicked your craving, and allowed you to avoid those unnecessary calories.
So try and elevate your consciousness when your are hungry and drink some water before you just rush to the pantry.
I have the ability to help people with weight loss without a diet and without excessive cardio. The reason is because a lot of the times if you just improve your basic functionality of the body, allowing things to work more efficiently, do more resistance training, that alone is going to make you lose weight. Focusing on getting healthier and weight loss just becomes a side effect of improved lifestyle habits.
Having that constant proper eating routine, having that proper water routine, and having that constant flow is better than being on this hardcore restrictive diet that holds onto waterways and makes it more difficult for you to lose that weight in the first place.
There is a time and a place for a low calorie diet, but more times than not its not necessary for the common folk just trying to feel good.
I hope this information helped. Thank you again for tuning in!
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