Make Over Your Drinks

 

I don’t eat much in the way of sweets — store-bought cookies are not at all tempting, and whenever we make a homemade dessert like cake or brownies, my husband and I tend to eat one serving and let the rest go stale. But drinks are my downfall. I just love Pepsi, extra-sweet iced tea, lemonade, hot cocoa, and sweet milky chai — not to mention sugar in my tea and coffee. Even healthy-seeming orange juice packs in a lot of calories.

And guess what else? I don’t like water. So replacing all the baddies with H2O isn’t going to cut it for me.

So what’s good (besides plain water?). Well, seltzer water, unsweetened teas and coffees (preferably black or with low-fat or non-fat milk), water or seltzer with a splash of juice or a slice of lemon or lime, and low-fat protein drinks all make the cut. (Protein drinks have calories, but they’re functional drinks: You need the calories to get you through a workout and the protein to boost your results. They also serve as meal- and snack-replacements, while most people drink Coke and other sweet beverages in addition to a full day’s worth of food calories.)

To make over my drink profile, I started by cutting the sugar out of my tea and coffee. It’s a small change that has big impact, since I tended to pile three teaspoons of sugar into each cup of coffee or tea. It took a few days, but now the sweet stuff tastes strange to me and the healthier options taste better!

I then replaced Pepsi at restaurants with unsweetened iced tea. I don’t love iced tea without sugar, but it still beats water. I save the soda for a rare treat, just as if it were dessert (and it kind of is dessert when you think about how much sugar is in there!).

Then there are the lemonade, chai, hot cocoa, and Thai iced tea (which has sugar and half-and-half). I don’t want to deprive myself of everything I love, so I try to keep it to one sweetened beverage per day. The rest of the time, I drink unsweetened tea, iced tea, and coffee.

Can these small changes really work? Here’s how it plays out. Say you used to have one can of Coke and three cups of coffee or tea with two teaspoons sugar each every day. There are 155 calories in a 12-ounce can of Coke. One teaspoon of sugar has 16 calories. One can of Coke and six teaspoons of sugar add up to 203 calories per day through beverages. That’s 74,095 calories in a year. It takes 3,500 calories to make a pound, so if you cut out those beverages and do nothing else, you’ll lose 21 pounds in a year. That’s no small potatoes (or should I say small Coke)!

Do you drink your calories? Have you done anything to move towards less caloriffic choices such as water or unsweetened beverages? I’d love to know. Please post in the Comments below!