If you are lossing your mind over your growing weight, here's some relief for you. Researchers now say that losing weight is now as easy as drinking a glass of water.
Researchers have shown that drinking 500ml of water half-an-hour before eating the three main meals of the day may help you lose weight.
"Just drinking a pint of water, three times a day, before your main meals may help reduce your weight," says Helen Parretti, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham.
For the study, which is published in the journal Obesity, obese adult participants recruited from general practices are monitored over a 12-week period.
Each of the participants are given a weight management consultation, where they are advised on how to adapt their lifestyle and improve their diet and levels of physical activity.
While half of them (41 adults) of those recruited are asked to preload with water, the other half ( 43 adults) are advised to imagine that they have a full stomach before eating.
Those in the group who are instructed to 'preload' with water lose, on average, 1.3 kg more than those in the control group.
Those who report preloading before all three main meals in the day report a loss of 4.3 kg over the 12 weeks, whereas those who only preload once, or not at all, only lose an average of 0.8kg.
"When combined with brief instructions on how to increase your amount of physical activity and on a healthy diet, this seems to help people to achieve some extra weight loss -- at a moderate and healthy rate,” Parretti points out.
"It is something that does not take much work to integrate into our busy everyday lives," Parretti says.
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