According to a British study, the simple gesture of drinking half a liter of water before each meal would have a rapid and dramatic impact on weight.
Does water help you lose weight? This question fuels many scientific debates and has not been clarified to this day. When water has the benefit of not providing calories, it also takes up space in the stomach, which can affect appetite and therefore calorie intake.
And that’s exactly what this small British study, conducted with 94 obese adults and followed for 12 weeks, assessed.
500 ml of water 30 minutes before each meal
At the beginning of the study, all participants received nutritional advice with recommendations for improving their diet and physical activity. In a randomized fashion, 41 volunteers were encouraged to drink 500 ml of water before main meals, the others served as controls. Other drinks such as mineral water, lemonades or diet drinks were not allowed as drinks.
Spectacular results
Surprisingly, the results are not only significant, but dramatic. People who drank water before meals lost an average of 1.3 kg more than the control group. And the effect is linear:
500 ml of water 30 minutes
(-4.3 kg) when water consumption is before the 3 main meals (vs. -0.8 kg for a single dose).
For the authors, if these data need to be confirmed, however, they show that a gesture as simple as drinking more water, especially before eating, is certainly an interesting preventive approach to obesity.
source
Parretti HM et al. : Efficacy of pre-loading with water before main meals as a weight loss strategy in primary care patients with obesity: RCT Obesity, Volume 23, Issue 9, pages 1785-1791.
