Most diets and those who prescribe them emphasize the importance of water in a healthy diet.
Does water make you lose weight?
The answer is clearly negative: if it were positive, we would burn extra calories with each glass of sipped water. This, of course, does not happen, because while on the one hand water does not supply energy, on the other it has no intrinsic capacity to increase the body's metabolism, as do nerve foods such as tea and coffee.
Drinking excessive amounts of water in the hope of losing weight can even prove to be a dangerous health practice. Strive to drink more at meals, for example, "extinguish the fire with which they burn food" (slows down and compromises digestion, excessively diluting the digestive juices). The water, once absorbed in the intestine, ends up in the blood, regulating its volume; if we drink too much, then, the plasma volume increases and with it arterial pressure. Finally, the excessive dilution of electrolytes, especially sodium (people who love the waters that are poor keep it in mind), can be very dangerous and even lethal in extreme cases.
Does drinking water help you lose weight?
In this case the answer can become positive based on some considerations. Let's look at them in detail.
If the water is drunk instead of alcohol, fruit juices, sweetened drinks, etc., the lower caloric intake can only be beneficial to weight loss.
In people who drink little, and they are really many, it can happen that a need for water is confused with a need for food; it seems nonsense but there is a fund of truth, since food contains a certain percentage of water (close to 80-90% in most vegetables and fresh fruit).
Drinking iced water, in theory, can help you lose a few more calories, but this is obviously a very dangerous and not recommended practice.
Drinking one or two glasses of water before meals helps to stimulate the sense of satiety, decreasing the amount of food ingested.
Does drinking little make you fat?
Also in this case there could be a fund of truth. We know, for example, that the adipose tissue is very poor in water, which instead abounds in the muscular one; not surprisingly, the obese subjects have a lower percentage of body water than the lean ones. Also the synthesis of glycogen, unlike lipogenesis, requires considerable amounts of water, since each gram of this polysaccharide binds almost 3 grams to it.
In athletes engaged in endurance sports, the lack of water promotes muscle catabolism, with an inevitable decrease in metabolism (cortisol, a stress hormone, has antidiuretic activity and its secretion increases in lack of water; at the same time dehydration reduces the testosterone secretion) *.
Furthermore, a correct water intake favors the elimination of toxins from the body, which by virtue of their lipophilicity tend to accumulate in the adipose tissue. An excess of circulating toxins due to reduced water intake could therefore have a fattening effect, as well as decidedly unhealthy.
Even if our body has extremely effective mechanisms to regulate water losses in function of entering, drinking in the right quantities is very important. More than doing it in the hope of losing weight, therefore, it makes more sense to drink to stay healthy and avoid all the unpleasant consequences of dehydration.
* (Judelson, A. et al. Effect of hydration state on exercise-induced resistance endocrine markers of anabolism, catabolism, and metabolism. Journal of Applied Physiology. July 10, 2008).
