Are you drinking enough water to lose weight?

Have you ever taken the time to think about how much water to consume for proper weight loss?  Most people live by that “golden rule”, drink eight 8oz. glasses of water per day.  Well, people, I hate to burst your bubble but this is just a myth.  Or should I say, this could be a rule of thumb for inactive slim people.  Truth of the matter is, if you are trying to lose weight , you have to drink enough water according to how much you weight to promote healthy weight loss.  

There are several reasons why you should pay attention to the amount of what you drink, especially when trying to lose weight.  Mainly, you do not want to dehydrate your body.  Here are some ways to tell if you are dehydrated:

• Lack of energy, fatigue in the afternoon
• Always hungry 
• Rough, dry skin
• Dry mucus membranes
• Weak irregular rapid heart beat
• Low blood pressure
• Sudden weight loss

These are just a few symptoms.  However there are some long term effects to dehydration as well:

• Premature aging
• Wrinkled skin
• Aches and pains

Best way to be sure you are not dehydrating your self is to stay educated on what will dry you out.  Drinks like coffee, soda pop or alcohol can cause dehydration symptoms.  Even some water can cause dehydration, such as fluoridated or chlorinated water.  As you know, most tap water and bottled water has fluoride in it.  Next time your purchase bottled water, take a look.  I will have to do a piece on fluoride in the water, but that’s another blog post.

What can you do to prevent dehydration?

• Drink a full glass o water upon rising in the morning and before going to bed
• Keep a glass of water at your bedside
• Drink a glass of water before and after athletic events and activities
•  Fill a pitcher that holds 8 glasses of water and be sure to drink it completely daily.

     

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·         So you are probably asking yourself at this point, how much water should I be drinking to lose weight?  Well that all depends on how much you weight.  I found a website, dietnation, which will calculate this for me.  I just put in how much I weight and it told me that I should be drinking at least 16 glasses of water each day.  Now you are the forgetful type like me, there are tools available to help you to remember to drink water.

 I myself use an application on my cell phone called Drink Water Beta  for Android created by Asplink.  This app is very basic, yet very effective.  You just put in how many cups of water you want to drink daily and set up your notifications.  You can set what time you want the notifications to begin and end, so your phone is not telling you to drink water while you are sleeping.  As you drink your water throughout the day, just pull the app up and click a cup as you finish each glass of water.  It will record that cup of water and what time you drank it.  Love this app.

Me personally, I think this is the main factor many people forget about when trying to lose weight.  You have to give your body the water it needs to increase your weight loss.  This will also help to flush out toxins in your body that is helping your body to hold on to weight.  Yes you will go to the bathroom often, but you will love the results each time you step on the scale.

Feel free to leave a comment on this post if you have some other water tips and tricks.

Great app for tracking your weight loss

Today I want to talk about tracking your success with weight loss.  There has been so many times that I have been approached, "oh, I see you're losing weight". Have you found yourself wondering, what in the world are they talking about.  I've gone up a pants size, they must be blind.  Well, for me, I don't have to wonder anymore.

There are so many benefits to be had when you are tracking your weight loss history.  It is much more involved than just saying, "I've lost two pounds today" and then mark it on the calendar.  For those who are serious about losing weight, there are many areas you need to track other than the pounds. Figure in what did you eat, what was the nutritional values associated with that meal.  Was that meal rich in protein or fat? Then there is the calorie count.  How many calories were consumed versus how many was burned for that day. To those who are just beginning their weight loss journey, this can be an extreme task.  This is where I was when I first began my weight loss regime.

Luckily for me, I have just recently purchased a new cell phone. I was being cursed all over because my phone would not hold a charge; therefore, I missed a lot of phone calls.  So I upgraded to an android phone.  I won’t mention what model I got because I absolutely hate it so far, yet I love all the new things I can do with the phone.  It has its goods and it's bad.  Anyway, being new to the Android world, I began downloading all these applications.  I came across a few apps geared towards tracking weight loss, however I have yet to find one as good as Calorie Counter.

This app saves everything you can think of when it comes down to tracking your weight.  This app is very easy to use and at first glance seems very basic.  However, in the background this app is analyzing every entry you put into it.  There are several parts to this app so I will review each section one by one.

      Food Diary

o   Saves meals and nutritional values by breakfast, lunch, dinner or snacks.

o   Easy to adjust to the portion amount eaten by servings, ounces, cups, etc.

o   Saves meals by date to be analyze by the embedded weight loss tracker

o   Recalculates your Recommended Daily Intake (RDI) as you make entries.

o   Input foods eaten by search

§  Restaurants, popular brands or Supermarket brands

§  Search for saved food items or enter one yourself

§  Save a picture of what you ate

o   Use the barcode scanner to scan in what you eat.

This is the best part of the application if you ask me.  There is no way to fully track your calories if you don’t know how many calories are in what you are eating.  It can be hard to find the nutritional values for most restaurants.  This app does all of this for you.  There can be long lists of foods listed, but I have not found this to be an issue really.  If you use the barcode scanner especially on store bought food, it is usually fairly easy to input hard to find foods.

      Exercise Diary

o   Saves defaulted activities by what day they are performed

o   Tracks a full 24 hour day worth of activity

o   Easy to customize activities and duration

o   Don’t see your activity listed, easily add one to the list

This exercise diary is the bomb.  Most people do not account for the calories that you burn just sitting, sleeping or driving. Well this application has all of that covered.  Work at a desk all day, well that is listed as well.  No need to account for the amount of calories burned, this app will do it for you.

      Weight Tracker

o   Opens to a grid chart that tracks your progress since the first entry

o   Write a journal for the day and attach it to your weigh in

o   At a glance look at whether you are gaining or losing weight.

The weight track is simple and to the point and easy to use. Only thing I don’t like about it is there seems to be no way to change an entry in case of a mistake in keying.  However, I can see how this will ensure that you are not lying to yourself about how much you weigh.  So still a great feature.

      Diet Calendar (saved the best for last)

o   Calculates every entry, food, exercise and weight

o   Analyzes the entries to project if you are on target or not

This I believe is the meat of this app.  It takes your entries and calculates them all together showing where you went wrong. Maybe you didn’t burn enough calories, or just ate too many.  You can tell this by comparing your net to your RDI.  Was your RDI on target, over the targeted goal or too far under the target.
The bonus to this app is that you can backup your entries to your SD card, but that’s not all.  You can link your app to an online account with Facebook, Twitter or FatSecret.com.  FatSecret.com is a free website created by the makers of Calorie Counter.  There you can link up with others and motivate each other to reach your weight loss goals.  There are tons of forum threads for support, diet challenges, or various diets in general. Currently this app is only available for Android and Blackberry systems.