Lifestyle Desk
Dinking a pint of water before you get to the kitchen table may help you lose weight, a new research published in Obesity suggests.
Recruiting 84 obese adults to take part in a 12-week-long study, the authors, after providing the participants with an in-person weight management consultation, randomly advised half of them to drink approximately a pint of water (or two cups) 30 minutes before a “main meal”, and the other half to simply imagine themselves with a full stomach before they sat down to eat (A follow-up consultation by phone occurred two weeks in.)
Though both groups, on average, lost weight by the end of the 12 weeks, the water-guzzlers lost about 3 more pounds than the imagination group. Among the former group, those who said that they always drank before each meal, or “preloaded”, lost 9.8 pounds compared to the 1.76 pounds lost by those who only preloaded once a day or not at all.
“When combined with brief instructions on how to increase your amount of physical activity and on a healthy diet, this seems to help people to achieve some extra weight loss — at a moderate and healthy rate,” said lead author Dr. Helen Paretti of the University at Birmingham in a statement . “It’s something that doesn’t take much work to integrate into our busy everyday lives.”
