Saturday 28 November 2009

Day 33 - Hot n Cold

Apparently, the temperature of the water you drink can make a difference to your diet. Seriously. In the main I have been drinking chilled water during my project, either from the fridge at home or the water cooler at work. Once or twice a day, I will have a hot water with a slice of lemon. But a colleague informed me weeks ago that drinking cold water is more beneficial because your body burns calories as it heats the water to your body temperature. Rubbish. Or so I thought.

I decided to do a bit of research on this and, amazingly, it turns out he was right. Well, that's according to http://health.howstuffworks.com/question447.htm This seems to be the general consensus on the articles I've looked at, which say you can burn an extra 70cals a day by drinking 8 small glasses of ice cold water. It seems reasonable to assume that your body is working that little bit harder to warm up your freezing tummy. But 0 degrees celcius? Come on. That's like drinking a snowball and, in the depths of a Northern winter, it's not something I'm prepared to do.

And there is an argument for drinking warm liquids while on a diet. While reading http://www.ehow.co.uk/how_5343296_drink-green-tea-diet.html?cr=1 - an article on drinking green tea to suppress appetitie - I was surprised to read the iced drinks theory only works in the summer while a hot drinks approach works best in winter. Presumably this is because you are trying to get your body to be the opposite of how it feels, temperature-wise (cool in summer, warm in winter). And this requires energy.

Either way, I'm not sure how much difference 70 cals a day will make to my weight loss programme. After all, there are 79 cals in a Lindt Lindor truffle ball. And I've had 5 already tonight...

1 comment:

  1. Funny! I had read that long ago, too, but had no idea the difference was so few calories. Not worth it for me as I love room temperature distilled water only and piping hot tea to iced tea (patently most un-Southern of me).

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