Posted by Phillip Richards

That’s right, I hate to be fat (or should I say obese), personally I think fat sounds better, obese sounds like a terminal illness. I wouldn’t say that I was the Pillsbury dough boy but what I had around my waist did not look good at all. I had let myself go big time and boy, I knew it.

I tried several schemes like herbalife in the hope of loosing weight (it only gave me constipation) and visiting to a dietitian who showered me with tasks and things to do which were simply not suited to my personality. In the end I just gave up trying. In any case the food tasted so good.

My condition was further complicated by the fact that I suffer from acid reflux which gives one the feeling of constantly being hungry, among other things. I racked my brains to try to come up with something that would help me loose weight.

Then one day I remembered a conversation that I had with the herbalife people. Somebody had instructed me to drink at least twelve glasses of water a day stating that “if you only do this, you will loose weight”. This led me to think the following; could it be that behind their weight loss philosophy, the real key to loosing weight is drinking enough water”?

I knew that in the course of a normal day I would drink at least a quart of full unskimmed milk and another quart carton of juice, several cups of tea, a couple of beers, a coke or two sometimes some wine and a whiskey.

All of this added up to a heck of a lot of calories, possibly as as many as fifteen hundred calories every day, just in drinks. Then the following question came to mind; If you lay off all the different types of drink can you manage on water alone? The answer was that I thought that I could and in any case I was going to give it a darned good try.

So I started drinking water, only water. There was some difficulty which came in the form of cravings but I must admit that they were nothing with which I couldn’t handle. I would see the milk, the juices, the sodas, wine and beers in the fridge every day but I told myself this; don’t act hard done by, this is your own free choice, your decision, in any case if you want the drinks they are there right before you, they are yours whatever you choose to do, you decide. It worked. All old tendencies of over compensating for what I had not been allowed to have during my childhood dissipated into thin air.

Furthermore, I as time went on I began to realize that I had been suffering from an addiction to acids and that condition was becoming weaker day by day and it’s control over me lessened. I was salivating less, felling less tummy rumbling and the binge urge was loosing it’s grip over me.

I would like to stress to anybody reading this article that this is not a diet in any way, it is a correction to dietary preferences and in any case we only really do need water along with out food.

A word of warning. Drinking too much water at one particular time is dangerous to your health because it effects the osmotic pressure of the blood. Drink one cup of water per hour or two cups every two hours not forgetting to eat three square meals per day which consist of no less than five hundred calories each.

And finally, regular walking for at least one hour a day will help your body to function better in every way. Don’t let up on yourself, in the end you will feel better for it.

By Andrew Routledge