Life is too short not to be fully "turned on." The Daily Turn On! energizes all aspects of "you." Every Monday The Daily Turn On! with That's Fit Life Fit expert Laura Lewis will provide you with ideas and tips to awaken your mind, your body and your life as you journey through each day of the week! Check in each Monday to get your tip for Turning On every day of your life.

Heads up to all you dieters who believe drinking non-calorie beverages such as diet soda, coffee, and tea instead of water will help you lose weight: With all calories and activity levels being the same, water drinkers win when it comes to weight loss!

Results of the first ever study to discover -- and validate -- that drinking water helps the body lose weight, independent of diet and physical activity, made it's debut this month in the journal of Obesity.

In a previous study, called the Stanford A to Z weight loss study, researchers enrolled 311 women and examined the effect of different types of diets (Atkins, Zone, Learn program, and the Ornish Diet) in an attempt to discern which was most effective for weight loss. Atkins was the winner, by the way. The study was highly-controlled and patients met regularly with dietitians.

Where did they come up with the results on why water is the winning weight loss elixir? Researchers went back to the same study for a secondary review and examined the data of 173 premenopausal overweight women (ages 25-50 years) and reanalyzed the impact of water intake and weight loss. The patients were divided into two groups, those who drank less than one liter of water per day and those that drank more than one liter of water per day. After the data was analyzed, researchers found that no matter what diet the women were on, an increase in drinking water to more than one liter of water per day was associated with a two kilogram or five pound weight loss over a twelve month time frame.

This week as your "Daily Turn On," turn up your metabolic furnace by drinking water instead of diet soda. Forgo the coffee, tea and other non-calorie beverages and drink up good ol' H2O! Before you know it, you just may drop a few pounds. A liter a day makes the pounds go away!

As if there weren't enough reasons to stay away from soft drinks, here's another one. Researchers recently said that normal soft drinks containing too much sugar can end up increasing serum uric acid levels. What does that lead to? An increase in the risk of developing gout, that's what. Gout is not only dangerous, but extremely painful.

Although the chemicals and artificial sweeteners in diet soft drinks are no better than the refined sugars in normal soft drinks, in this case diet drinks win. Since sugar is not present in most diet soft drinks, gout of not a concern.

When gout happens, too much uric acid (caused by the breakdown of sugars from soft drinks) causes painful crystals to develop in the joints. Underexcretion (not peeing enough) also contributes to the condition.

Want a great New Year's resolution? Start dropping soft drinks from your daily regimen starting now.

Boost your brain power with these foods:

Find out why!

Source

In a follow-up to this post from a few days ago, I was thinking about possible alternatives to regular soft drinks since there is so much refined sugar in those beverages and new research shows that they are also now linked to diabetes. This came as little surprise, since huge intakes of refined sugar is almost always correlated with the incidence of diabetes in many cases I have read.

But what is an alternative? It's hard to think of diet soft drinks as alternatives once you've researched what aspartame, NutraSweet, saccharin and other fake sweeteners can really do. that pretty much knocks out all diet soft drinks for me as well. Search Google or another search engine and read up on these sweeteners from trusted sources (note: you're in for a shock).

Flavored teas and healthy fruit drinks are my solution (although non that contain the cheap high-fructose corn syrup), so what is your non-soft drink method of beverage drinking?

Source