How to lose weight without dieting

Practically every diet tells you to ditch the sugary sodas and juices and to start hydrating with water instead. And it’s always made sense. After all, it has been proven that sugary drinks hamper your ability to lose weight. And drinking water is essential to your health — helping you maintain the balance of bodily fluids, flushing the toxins and impurities from your body, promoting normal digestion and bowel function, energizing muscles and even adding moisture to your hair and skin.

Drinking water is healthy. But does drinking water help you lose weight? Current research indicates that the answer to this question is yes.

According to a recent study led by researchers at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., drinking water 30 minutes before main meals helped people to lose weight.

“If you look at any sort of weight management programs, they all say drinking water is a really good thing,” says lead author of the study Dr. Amanda Daley of the University of Birmingham. “We said, let’s go see what the actual evidence is for this.”

To conduct the study, researchers looked at 84 overweight men and women. Though no age range of the participants was detailed in the study’s results, the average age was determined to be 56 years.

Each of the participants was given general weight loss advice, then assigned to one of two groups. One group was instructed to drink 16 ounces of water 30 minutes before their meals, while the other half of the participants was told to simply imagine that they were full before eating.

To keep tabs on the participants, the researchers monitored everyone’s weight at the start, middle and end of the experiment, and even took urine samples to ensure that the water-drinking group was indeed drinking more water. The researchers also tracked factors such as the participants’ physical activity and food choices to make sure there was not any significant difference between the two groups.