Some of the most common diet advice I’ve heard or read over the last 15 years has been advice that simply doesn’t work for me. For any of you that read this blog, you might have picked up on it, or you might have assumed I made those changes already for weight loss.
Some of the most common advice I’ve seen boils down to four simple words: “Don’t Drink Your Calories.”
Alcohol contains about 7 calories per gram or roughly per milliliter. Fruit is already nature’s candy, and drinking fruit juice means you get none of the fibrous benefits but all of the candy, concentrated down in a single glass (your average orange is 65 calories / 13gm sugar; a 1.5-cup glass (the average household tumbler) is about 170 calories / 31 gm sugar). Or, a can of soda is around 150 calories with a whopping 39 gms of sugar (while some others, like Fanta which my pseudo-mother-in-law likes, is 160 calories with 44 gms of sugar).
So, if you cut out the evening cocktail, beer, or glass of wine, and you cut out your morning fruit juice, and you cut out two cans of soda, you have cut out over 600 calories from your day. For many, that is enough to see serious changes in your weight before even a week is up, much less a month.
Problem for me: I don’t drink that stuff, anyway.
I’ve never drunk alcohol. I just don’t like the flavor. I view alcohol as a bit of a Stockholm Syndrome sorta thing: Most people don’t start liking it, it’s an “acquired taste.” The fact that it’s called that means you don’t start out liking it. You have to be trained. And then, you furiously defend the fact that you like it. I never got to that first stage.
I also don’t drink (or never did drink) regular soda. When I was growing up, we always had diet soda at home, so that’s what I grew up liking. I don’t like the taste of regular soda (though I’ll drink a regular Sprite/7-Up or Orange thing if I had to). So it’s not something I can cut out.
I also never really drank fruit juice. There was a roughly 1–2 year period of time at the beginning of grad school when I did so that I could get all those fortified vitamins and minerals. And then I realized just how many calories I was drinking and I could get all those through other means. Drinking fruit juice is back to being a bit of a battle at home because my bf likes his OJ, MJ (mango), and other J. But every time he offers, I just respond slightly judgmentally: “I choose not to drink my calories. I’d rather have a cookie.” But, he still offers, and I still refuse.
Anyway, in conclusion … that’s why one of the most common weight loss / diet tips does not work for me: I already do it, so there’s nothing to change, so I can’t gain (or, well, lose) anything by doing it.
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