Both children and adults get an average of 400 calories per day from beverages with added sugars! Not only that, but research shows that drinking sugary drinks is linked to Type 2 diabetes.

Even some smoothies are extraordinarily high in sugar. For example, Jamba Juice has a chocolate smoothie that contains 900 calories! It has 10 grams fat and 166 grams of sugar. That's more sugar than two pints of Ben and Jerry's Butter Pecan ice cream.

The kicker is that those sugary calories do very little to reduce hunger. In other words, people tend to eat just as much as they would normally. Your body senses the weight from the water in the short term, doesn't do much to curb appetite from the calories it contains. Plus you don't have to work for it (e.g., chew) so the calories go down quickly.

Alcohol is a contributor to these liquid calories too, and is worthy of a separate discussion (below).

What about quenching thirst? Big beverage companies have spent billions of dollars on making us think their beverages can quench our thirst, and they've done a remarkably good selling job. But the fact is that the alcohol, caffeine, and even diet drinks do a poor job of it. None of them are nearly as effective as water alone.

So the question you have to ask yourself is this: Are those 400 calories (or whatever extra calories you're drinking) really worth it?

Drinking water with zero calories instead of all those other drinks is a pretty powerful way to lower your overall calorie intake.

Let's talk about a few specifics below...

Coffee & Tea?

Some coffee beverages can contain up to 500 calories. Obviously it's best to drink green tea and black coffee. Or at least control the amount of added sugar, milk, cream etc.

Diet Sodas?

What about sodas or colas sweetened with artificial sweeteners so the drink has zero or no calories?

Surprisingly, the latest studies say there is no evidence that diet soda inhibits fat loss, or that it even spikes insulin levels to levels that would be detrimental to health. Also, all current research has found diet soda sweeteners to be safe. According to science, then we might tentatively conclude that diet soda is harmless when consumed on an otherwise controlled diet.

A controlled diet is the key word -- a healthy diet without excess calories. How many diet soda drinkers have that kind of diet? Do you? According to a very large number of correlational studies diet soda is strongly linked to unhealthy, overweight individuals. People recognize the high sugar and calories in soda is bad -- and they don't want to stop drinking it -- so they start drinking diet soda.

Sure, it's a logical substitution to reduce calories and sugar, but is it sabotaging your efforts? Does it create a weakness for other tempting foods you're trying to avoid? Only you can answer that. If weight loss is not what you want it to be, you should consider dropping soda for awhile to see what happens.

Alcohol?

People tend to focus on a few number of studies published by the alcohol industry where alcohol provides some positive benefit. But it's not the whole story. In our view, the negatives far outweigh the positives -- especially when it comes to losing weight.

We know that can be tough to hear for some people, but alcohol can block weight loss for a number of reasons. Only you can decide the best course of action.

Here are the drawbacks of alcohol when it comes to losing weight:

Alcohol tends to lower motivation to eat healthy and stick with goals. It lowers your awareness and self-control. If you have one drink, all bets are off -- particularly if you are in an enjoyable social situation with friends or family.

For many, alcohol is a food that is habitually associated with high-calorie-dense eating (like pizza, chicken wings, chips, etc). That's a bad habit by itself. Also, if alcohol is consumed before and while eating, it can trigger your appetite causing extra calorie intake.

Alcohol is calorie dense (7 calories per gram), second only to fat (9 calories per gram). Obviously, the higher the alcohol content of the drink, the greater the calories. And those calories do not satisfy hunger. Instead, they add to the calories you are already getting from food.

If the alcohol comes paired with other ingredients, such as a daiquiri,margarita, pina colada, etc, then you're often looking at 300 total calories.

Alcohol is seen by the body as a sort of metabolic toxin because it cannot be stored anywhere in the body, making it the first priority for oxidation. That means your body has to burn it off before anything else, including any fat in your diet. And that's not good considering how likely it is that alcohol has caused you have eaten too many calories in the first place. The end result is that alcohol is a common cause of eating more calories than your body can burn in a day.

Other negatives of alcohol:

It slows the brain and retards organs that are important for digestion and elimination of toxins.
It is a diuretic, meaning it causes the body to flush water out of the body which can cause unnecessary dehydration. Alcohol also shuts down the process of moving water into dehydrated cells, leaving them in their dehydrated state with no way to fix it until the alcohol leaves the body. The brain in particular suffers from this lack, and signals its state of dehydration with a hangover headache.
There's even good evidence that even small amounts of alcohol consumption by women increase the risk of breast cancer.

If you do continue to drink, do so with careful planning and moderation. Example: Having one glass of wine or beer along with a healthy low-CD evening meal isn't likely to backfire on you according to some research (what's a low-CD meal? See the Fat Burning Foods page).

Even if you think alcohol consumption is managed, it could be the reason you aren't losing weight or making progress -- even if you don't know why or doesn't make sense.

Case Study: Martha B. was having trouble losing weight and was very frustrated because she kept losing and gaining the same 10 pounds, in spite of a great diet and working out hard. Having heard of the drawbacks of alcohol from her trainers, her doctor, and so forth -- she just couldn't imagine how it was affecting her weight when everything else about her diet and physical activity seemed so in control. Eventually she decided to go for it and give up alcohol completely. Result? Within one year, Martha had stopped yo-yo'ing and lost 50 pounds... without changing anything in her routine.

Everyone is different, of course. But eliminating alcohol is something to consider.

If going cold turkey scares you, then make it a gradual process -- such as only drinking alcohol once or twice a week as an occasional indulgence, then cut back to once a week for a month or two, then stop drinking entirely.

Fruit Juice?

You may be surprised to hear this but fruit juice has as many calories as regular soda pop. It's essentially a cup full of sugar with some vitamins.

In addition, from a metabolic perspective, pure fructose (fruit sugar) when taken in large, concentrated quantities (e.g., high-fructose corn syrup) is considered worse than table sugar (sucrose). We all tend to think drinking fruit juice is healthy but in reality it's nowhere near as healthy as eating whole fruit.

Fruit sugar (fructose) eaten with whole fruit does not have the same metabolic issues. In fact it's the opposite because whole fruit comes packaged with fiber that slows digestion and moderates the effects of fructose. Fruit works really well on an everyday weight loss or weight maintenance plan for the majority of people. It's one of those low-CD foods that you can eat a lot of without packing on calories.

For weight loss purposes, you should treat fruit juice the way you do sodas. Because there isn't such a thing as zero-calorie fruit juice ("diet fruit juice"), you are better off avoiding it when you're trying to cut calories. Or limit it to a small amount.