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.