Ok,this post is not about being alcoholic, nor it’s about friday evening drinks either. Firstly, because I’m far from telling people not to drink alcohol, but mainly - this blog is about getting in shape, not about rehab :). This is about something that many people do not realize, which is amount of calories they drink every day.
Let’s say you start your day with nice healthy breakfast (for instance oatmeal with nuts and berries or some lean beef with eggs and vegetables) and glass juice. You drink big nice coffee mocha two hours later. You get glass of regular coke or other soda drink with your lunch, after which you have another coffee, duh! You drink one more glass of that healthy “organic” juice before you leave your work and you finish the day with well deserved pint of beer. Oh, I’ve forgot to say that you eat properly the whole day, with no fast foods nor sweets.
Sounds familiar? Many people think that this is way to go and that this pattern is quite healthy. Well, let’s find out.
| Glass of juice | 100 kcal |
| Starbucks Venti Mocha | 340 kcal |
| Glass of coke | 140 kcal |
| Costa big Mocha | 380 kcal |
| Glass of juice | 100 kcal |
| Beer | 150 kcal |
| Total | 1210 kcal |
This adds up to beautiful 1210 calories. 1200 calories, that we usually forget about, provided mostly by sugars. It doesn’t make difference if you drink ice tea or any other sweet drink instead of soda. Even if you go with aspartame diet soda, the gain is little. I don’t know about you, but from my experience I see serious problem here. I’d used to drink around 2 litres of soda each day and trust me , it didn’t end well at all.
I cannot stress out enough how huge impact do drinks have on our caloric intake, but let me say it once again - assuming above, you‘ve just drunk over half of your daily calories. One might say that it’s enough to include these in daily caloric calculations, but on that high level, there is just not enough space for all that food that you actually should eat.
The only solution to that problem is to care about your drinks. New meaning of “drinkaware” :D? In my case, I drink two skinny decaf coffees per day (around 350 kcal in total), few cups of tea and lots of filtered water. And that’s it.
You might ask “what about alcohol”? I think that there are two sides of that story. Positive, when we think about beer replenishing your sugar levels and wine preventing heart diseases, and negative, like blocking testosterone, calories quickly adding up to huge number, hangover and many others. The choice is an individual matter and should not be imposed ever. After all, you can always make “room” for alcohol based calories in your weekly meal plan.
One advice I can give is to buy Brita filter and switch to plain water. Your body will thank you very quickly.