Drinking water before eating helps you lose weight: myth or reality?

Drink a glass of water before food helps you lose weight. The phrase, repeated a thousand times as advice, has been studied by specialists in Harvard Universitywhich has scientifically proven whether it is truth or myth.

A priori, the healthy suggestion of filling your stomach with water before eating seems sensible since it will be good for you feel full and stop eating. But does it really work? And when a person drinks water constantly throughout the day?

First of all it is good to clarify this You should always consult a doctor or nutritionist before making a decision related to food and health, in order to provide the best diagnosis and treatment to follow.

Having said this, “it is essential to appropriately select what we add to our daily diet, accompanying it physical activity and other habit changes“, they explain from the site Mayo Clinica non-profit organization dedicated to clinical practice, training and research.

Precisely with this formula, specialists affirm that only by choosing well what we eat, We can burn up to 300 calories a day.

When we eat pre-processed foods, the body is forced to work harder to break them down, so we burn more calories and store less fat.

What Harvard says about drinking a glass of water before meals

According to what is widespread in Harvard Health Publishingto exist three theories that the prestigious American university makes known and are the following:

You feel full, eat less

Filling up on water before meals has an intuitive appeal. The stomach has nerves that sense stretching and send signals to the brain that it’s time to stop eating. Presumably, drinking before a meal could send similar signals.

Short-term research supports this idea, Harvard says. For example, older study subjects who drank a full glass of water before meals tended to eat less than those who didn’t.

Another study found that people who followed a low-calorie diet and drank more water before meals had less appetite and greater weight loss over 12 weeks compared to those who did not drink additional water.

It’s worth noting that none of the studies assessed the impact of drinking more water on long-term weight loss.

Burn calories

The water we drink must be heated to body temperature, a process that requires the body to expend energy. And then this expended energy (called thermogenesis) could compensate for the calories in your meals.

Recent studies They found no evidence that drinking water burned many caloriescontrary to what has been demonstrated by works from a long time ago, the American research center admits.

In this way, the thermogenesis explanation for water-induced weight loss is called into question.

You’re not hungry, you’re thirsty

This explanation suggests that sometimes we go to the kitchen to eat something when in reality we are thirsty instead of hungry. If so, drinking calorie-free water may prevent us from consuming unnecessary calories, which could aid weight loss.

The regulation of thirst and hunger is complex and varies throughout a person’s life, specialists say. For example, they argue, Thirst may decrease in older adults.

However, they failed to find convincing human studies to support the idea that drinking water could help you lose weight.

More truths and myths about hydration and weight loss

The doctor Robert H. Shmerlingsenior education editor of Harvard Health Publishingalso took other aspects into account.

Some of them are related to the fact that hydration improves exercise capacity and, therefore, weight loss, which cannot be confirmed by the expert.

This also replace your intake of high-calorie drinks with water It could certainly lead to long-term weight loss.

And ultimately, that Burning fat doesn’t necessarily require water. Dehydration affects your body’s ability to break down fat for fuel. So, perhaps drinking more water will encourage weight loss. But he hasn’t even found evidence that this is true.