Often when someone decides to change their diet either to get healthy or to lose weight they forget about their beverages. So here’s a quick checklist for getting your beverages to match up with your new eating plan.
Go through your beverages and eliminate any that contain:
- Caffeine – don’t forget that many diet sodas have caffeine. Caffeine has the same insulin-stimulating, weight-loss-inhibiting effect as aspartame.
- Sweeteners: Aspartame, Nutrasweet, high fructose corn syrup, refined sugar, sucrose, corn syrup or corn syrup product and dextros.
Read labels! I had been drinking this delicious fruit-flavored mineral water for some time when I looked at the label and was horrified to find that it contained high fructose corn sweetener! What can you drink? While plain water would be ideal sometimes you want a little variety – especially when you’re trying to drink half your body weight in ounces. So to make it easier for you to get your beverage on check out some of the suggestions below to add some excitement to your water:
- water with a squeeze of lemon, lime, orange or grapefruit juice
- herbal teas, hot or iced
- vegetable juice (be careful of the sodium content in store-bought juices)
- hot vegetable broth
- Stevia is an excellent choice for a natural sweetener in your beverages. Some people (myself included) think it has a bit of a bitter after-taste. Liquid stevia generally has less additives than powdered stevia. Read your labels!
- Monk fruit is another natural sweetener which like stevia has 0 carbs and 0 calories and less of an after-taste. The problem with monk fruit is that it’s difficult to find pure monk fruit. Skinny Girl Monk Fruit Extract Liquid Sweetener, Monk Fruit in the Raw and Monk Fruit to Go have 0 carbs and few to 0 additives.
