Lose Weight By Drinking Water

It's still the New Year and you still have a chance to lose weight. One way to lose weight is to increase your intake of water and decrease your intake of any type of beverage with a carbohydrate in it. According to the Obesity Society of the United States, a study has shown that dieters who have the discipline to exchange their sugary drinks or carbonated diet drinks with water instead will lose an additional five pounds a year. Furthermore, ff you simply manage to drink 16 ounces or more glasses of water a day even without cutting out your sugary or carbonated drinks you will still lose two pounds a day.

In the past all kinds of diet programs have always recommended drinking plenty of water but this was the first study known of by the society to actually support this theory that 'drinking water causes weight loss.'

In this study, weight loss researchers compared 240 dieting woman with each other. The women, who were aged 25 to 50 were all on different diets such as the Atkins Diet, The Zone and the South Beach diet. One thing that all of these diet programs have in common by the way is that they limit the amount of calories that a person can consume a day.

Before the women begun their diets they were instructed by the researchers to drink two cans of sugary drinks a day (that would amount to being about 200 calories for each woman.) This included beverages like soda pop and juice. Then during the course of the study, some of the women replaced these calories with water. The two groups, the water-drinkers and the sugary beverage drinkers, were then compared in terms of how much weight they lost over a period of a year.

The water and weight loss study found that the dieting women who replaced all of their sweetened drinks with water lost five pounds more in a year then women who continued to drink the sugary drinks. Women who drank more than four cups of water a day lost an additional 2 pounds more than women who did not increase their water intake at all.

It doesn't matter if you drink bottled water, bubbly water or tap water. The idea is to displace those sugary beverages with as much water as you possibly can in a day. Not only does this limit calories it is also healthy for you in other ways.

Not only does being properly hydrated help your muscles and metabolism work at their best, but drinking a large volume of water also helps prevent you from snacking because you feel full. It is recommended that you drink at least eight cups of water a day to optimize your weight loss.

To remain in the best of health, especially while you are losing weight, it is important for your body to remain properly hydrated. This is because two thirds of our total body weight is made up of water.

Does Your Baby Have GERD?

Before you can understand GERD you need to comprehend what GER is.

GER is describes a continuous every day normal function. Very simply, gastro esophageal reflux (GER) describes the physiologic condition in which stomach contents come back up from the stomach into the esophagus. It is a physiologic process, which means it is normal. In fact all babies have reflux and so do you. It is normal for the stomach to occasionally push its contents up into the esophagus briefly every now and then. It is how often that the stomach does this that makes it a painful thing.

In a healthy baby GER doesn't cause problems. The acid that makes up the refluxed material can irritate the esophagus and upper airway so much that symptoms develop.

When symptoms interfere with a baby's day-to- day activity reflux is referred to s gastroesoophageal reflux disease (GERD). Doctors may refer to it as pathologic reflux.

The difference between GER and GERD is key. It helps us discriminate between a normal function and an abnormal one. Babies with GER spit up but don't suffer any consequences. This is your average happy, healthy growing baby with wet burps.

On the other hand babies with GERD typically face problems relating to feeding, growth or breathing as a consequence of their reflux. These are typically identified, as sick babies ho need medical attention. So while all babies have some degree of GER fewer suffer from GERD.

Everyone including you and your baby experiences reflux during the day. However as an adult you do not need a burping cloth.

Babies' reflux is due to elements of infant physiology and anatomy, which may lead some credence to Dr. Harvey Karp's theory that there is a 'fourth trimester' that a baby experiences outside the womb. (Karp is a very famous contemporary pediatrician whose advice is dutifully followed by many parents.)

The theory is that usually a faulty stomach valve causes GERD. It is faulty in a baby because it has yet to develop.

This valve in question is at the bottom of the esophagus. It is a ring of muscles called the lower esophageal sphincter (LES) that helps keep stomach contents where they belong.

In babies the LES does not stay squeezed closed. When this happens stomach contents are allowed to flow back into the esophagus. By the time a baby is six weeks old these muscles grow stronger and less regurgitation is likely.

The fact that reflux can go on more than one or two months o face tells us that reflux is due to more than just a LES issue.

On of the major factors contributing to reflux in infants is the delayed emptying of the stomach. Under normal circumstance a liquid meal should be gone from a baby's stomaching approximately a half an hour to an hour. During the first months of a baby's life the stomach can be inefficient at emptying and milk has a tendency to sit in the stomach longer than it should. This is because the baby just has slower intestinal motility and there is nothing anyone can really do about it except cope with it and be tolerant until the baby's digestive system is more mature.