Don't drink your calories

Sucrose, Glucose, Dextrose, Corn Syrup, Fructose. These are all fancy words for Sugar. We all know that cookies, cake, ice cream all have added sugar, and that we should avoid those kinds of foods if we are trying to lose weight. During the weight management program we were showed this video from the New York City Health Department:


What the heck?! 16 packets of sugar in a 20oz bottle of soda? Yikes! It's almost a conspiracy among beverage companies. When you are out and you purchase an individual bottle of soda, juice, tea, whatever, the serving size is almost always 2, so when you drink the whole bottle in one sitting and who doesn't (except this one girl I work with, who actually caps it and puts it in the fridge for later) you need to double the nutritional information on the bottle – so 32 grams of sugar becomes 64! It's just plain sneaky and mean. Hidden sugar in soft drinks can bulk up your daily calorie intake by 600 calories, and that's just 1 bottle with each meal.

Take a look at this website and see where your favorite soft drink stacks up in sugar cubes: http://www.sugarstacks.com/beverages.html

When you're drinking your calories, it's easy to lose track of how many calories you are taking in because it's not a meal, and you don't often think about soft drinks as food. People are often dumbfounded when they learn how much sugar and calories are in their drink consumption and the first thought is, "What am I going to drink now? My only choices are water, un-sweetened tea, diet drinks and milk!" And they would be correct. America as a country has a really bad soft drink habit, and if you think about the advertising of these drinks, they aren't selling you a product; they are selling you a culture. The Cola wars, Mountain Dew extreme, Snapple hippies they all want you to buy in to the culture of the product, and we do. Water is boring; we don't want to be boring caring around a bottle of water (which often is more expensive than other soft drinks) and be THAT guy, you know the guy who is wearing pretentious work-out cloths and carrying a yoga mat.

Let's put our judgmental differences aside for health’s sake. The truth of the matter is, if you're not getting enough water, you're going to be dehydrated. The human body is over 61% water, we need it to survive. We don't need to be ingesting liquid that can eat the enamel off of our teeth or be used to clean a car battery!

Let's kick our soft drink habit, put a stop to this evil hidden sugar guy in the video below, and get a head start on weight loss! http://adland.tv/commercials/nickelodeon-hidden-sugar-2005-60-usa