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21 " Try this at home: Measure your heart rate before and after drinking two cups of water. Within ten minutes of drinking the water, your heart rate should slow by about four beats per minute, and by fifteen minutes, you should be down six or seven beats. "
― Michael Greger , How not to diet
22 " Drinking two cups of water increased the metabolic rate of men and women by 30 percent. The increase started within ten minutes of water drinking and reached a maximum within an hour. In the ninety minutes after drinking a single tall glass of water, the subjects burned an extra twenty-four calories.4437 Simply drinking a tall glass of water four times throughout the day would wipe out nearly one hundred extra calories, more than the calories burned by taking weight-loss doses of the now-banned ephedrine three times a day.4438 Plain, cheap, safe, and legal tap water! "
23 " Fewer than 3 percent of Americans reach even the recommended minimum daily adequate intake of fiber. "
24 " Nearly everyone is suffering from a fiber-deficient diet, and that’s just based on the wimpy federal recommendations of fourteen grams per thousand calories, which comes out to be about twenty-five grams per day for women and thirty-eight daily grams for men.1273 That’s a far cry from the hundred grams our bodies were designed to get,1274 based on the diets of modern-day, isolated, hunter-gatherer tribes "
25 " reactive protein levels in the blood are ideally under 1 mg/L, "
26 " When people are randomized into diet-and-exercise interventions versus diet alone, the diet-and-exercise groups do better, but the difference in weight loss only averages about two pounds.3095 The studies lasted between three and twelve months, and all that extra prescribed exercise seemed to translate into only a few pounds lost. "
27 " Those randomized to even just thirty seconds a day of a cold-water blast ended up taking off fewer sick days from work.3484 Foods "
28 " The longer-term trials performed even worse. In a meta-analysis of eighteen randomized controlled studies lasting a minimum of six months, the diet-plus-exercise group failed to beat out the diet-only group at all. "
29 " To walk off the calories found in a single pat of butter, we’d have to add an extra seven hundred yards to our stroll that evening. What about a Snickers bar? We’d need to jog a quarter mile for every single bite. "
30 " The recommended dietary allowance for protein is about 50 grams a day (46 for women, 56 for men). "
31 " What if you give young adults two cups of water immediately before a meal? Do they then eat less? Indeed, they eat about 20 percent less, taking in more than one hundred fewer calories. "
32 " Overweight women were randomized to eat calorie-restricted weight-loss diets with or without a teaspoon of added cumin a day (half a teaspoon at both lunch and dinner). Over the three-month study, those in the cumin group lost about four more pounds and nearly an extra inch off their waists, in addition to significantly dropping their triglycerides and cholesterol.2727 Since cumin can be purchased in bulk for less than a dollar an ounce, a teaspoon would cost less than ten cents a day. "
33 " People seem to be better able to deal with coming up short on positive goals than negative ones. So framing your subgoals as things you want to accomplish, rather than avoid, can help you escape the fatalistic, black-and-white thinking that can subvert your longer-term goals. "
34 " A recent systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized, controlled weight-loss trials found that about a quarter teaspoon of black cumin powder every day appears to reduce body mass index within a span of a couple of months. "
35 " A BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered “ideal weight. "
36 " Even weight loss of just a few pounds is pretty remarkable given the tiny doses utilized, about 100 mg, which is equivalent to around an eighth of a teaspoon of the spice. The problem is that saffron is the most expensive spice in the world. It’s composed of delicate threads poking out of the saffron crocus. Each flower produces only a few threads, such that you need fifty thousand flowers—enough flowers to fill a football field—to make a single pound of spice, so that pinch of saffron could cost up to a dollar a day. "
37 " Preload studies, where people are fed a first course one, five, fifteen, twenty, thirty, or sixty minutes before the main meal, show that this fullness feedback loop may take about twenty minutes to fully tamp down our appetites. "
38 " The group of overweight nine- to twelve-year-olds randomized to the water intervention was told to increase their water intakes to the point their urine became straw-colored (pale yellow). Once again, not every kid complied, but those who did lost significantly more weight.3856 Inspired "
39 " Not only does alcohol carry its own calories, it may end up increasing intake. I mean, the whole purported point of an aperitif is to stimulate appetite. When people drink a glass of wine or beer before lunch, they may eat more food than if they had drunk the same volume and calories of grape juice and other nonalcoholic beverages.4531 Those drinking a beer with quadruple the regular alcohol content ate two hundred calories more at a subsequent meal compared to those drinking a regular beer—and that was above and beyond the beer’s own calories.4532 So it’s like a reverse-preload effect that just makes things worse. "
40 " Is there any danger in drinking too much water? Absolutely, yes. Even healthy kidneys can only handle about three cups of water an hour. "