Skip the Spirits

Thinking about Happy Hour at TGIF’s? Think again. Having a drink before a meal causes most people to eat about 200 calories more during dinner, not to mention all those extra ‘liquid’ calories that just ease on down without any effort.

Drinking with dinner isn’t a good idea either. The body burns off alcohol first – your liver working at warp speed, meaning that the calories in the rest of the meal are more likely to be stored as fat.

If you do have a cocktail craving, stick to wine. It has 80 calories a glass; or squeak by with even less alcoholic calories by drinking a white-wine spritzer (two ounces of wine mixed with two ounces of seltzer). Even better you could chug down one of those weight loss drinks to help you burn a few extra calories.

Drink 1 ½ Liters of Ice Water Daily

Water helps prevent you from getting bloated by flushing out excess water weight and ice water can do even more.

The fat burning process of metabolism needs water to work effectively. Your body has to raise your metabolism even more to burn extra calories to warm up the ice cold water you drink.

A Clinical Research Center in Berlin found that after you drink 17 ounces of ice water, your fat-burning metabolism increases by 30% within 10 minutes of drinking water.

If you want to increase your metabolism even more, drink your ice water in a cold room. If you keep your thermostat down in your home, your body has to work harder to maintain your body temperature, which of course revs up your metabolism even more. Pass the ice water! What an easy way to burn excess fat! You can think of ice water as a weight loss drink.