Water and your weight

Ladies and Gentlemen as a fitness professional I am often asked questions about ways for people to lose weight a little quicker.

When it comes to water there are 2 options;

Drink Ice Cold, and I literally mean ice cold water. Doing this causes your metabolism to work harder because your body wants to heat that water up to body temperature. Doing this won't cause 20 lbs to drop off overnight, this may add to roughly 5 extra pounds lost during the course of the year. Not to mention the water does help you eliminate waste.

Shed water weight, this can be done by limiting the amount of sodium you intake daily *. The sodium can cause you to retain water and thus appear bloated. I have been told that some people can be walking around with 5 to 10 lbs of excess weight do to water retention. While you are limiting your intake of sodium you need to increase you intake of water in order to flush out the excess sodium.

There is also another way to shed the water weight. I do not recommend this for the average person looking to lose weight because it can be very dangerous if not done with supervision. This way is to sweat out that water through moderate to high intensity cardio exercise while wearing say long pants and a long sleeved shirt. Again I do not suggest or advise this for the average person because dehydration can set in and could result in fainting, kidney failure and possible death. So unless you are a very expierenced exerciser DO NOT DO THIS.

* Limiting sodium intake can be tricky to do because if you look at the labels on most foods you will see an obscene ammount of sodium. For instance if I take a can of soup from my cupboard I can see the sodium is nearly 50% of your daily required intake.