Think Before You Drink
Make your beverages work harder for you instead of derailing your diet. It’s now a known fact that sweetened drinks are the only specific food directly linked to weight gain.
Here are some tips to help you make smarter choices:
- Drink more water. Tap, bottled, or sparkling. Make it more appealing by adding a wedge of lemon or lime.
- Buy one 100 percent fruit juice. Instead of flavored drinks with added sugar. But limit juices to one or two four-ounce servings a day (or dilute with water).
- Switch to fat free or low fat milk instead of 2 percent or whole milk.
- Don’t keep soft drinks in the house. And order water, unsweetened tea or low-fat milk when eating out. if you can’t “kick the can”, switch to diet soda and limit to one or two a day.
- Do the math. Those ubiquitous 20 and 24-ounce bottles of soda are really two to three servings. If you drink at all, multiply the listed calories by two or three.
- Don’t make calorie assumptions — even water isn’t always calorie free in these days of specialty water.
- Order coffee drinks with fat free milk and skip the whip. Whipped cream adds 60 to 100 calories and 6 to 11 grams of fat, depending on the type and size of your drink.
- Request sugar free syrup for coffee drinks. Or, ask for fewer pumps of regular syrup; you will save 20 calories and 1-1/4 teaspons of sugar per pump.
- Watch out for frozen coffee drinks that are more like milk shakes. Instead, order “skinny lattes”.
- Scale back your smoothie serving size
- Drink alcohol in moderation
