Me and the significant other have known this for quite a while. Frankly, I'm REALLY surprised that this wasn't an established scientific result.
The way it works IMHO is not too obscure - water fills you up and gives you the impression of being 'full' earlier, so you tend to reduce your regular food intake. Feeling 'fuller' equates to being satiated for a lot of people (including me), so the tendency to chow out at random times during the day is highly reduced/eliminated.
I used to be 90+ kg in the middle of 2009. Once I decided to drink copious amounts of water during the day, by Jan 2010 I had come to about 60ish kg and lost 4 inches around the waist. My other breakfast/lunch/dinner eating habits remained the same, and the water meant I cut down on snacking between meals.
Seriously, isn't there any research showing water fills you up?
In the study, they controlled for caloric intake by giving everyone a limit. This would seem to point toward an effect other than the fact that water makes you eat less. It's possible that the group drinking water actually stayed below their caloric limit, but I didn't see that mentioned in the article.
I imagine it's hard to enforce caloric intake limits effectively. Perhaps people who drank water simply had more success staying within (or close to) the allocated limit.
Frankly, I'm REALLY surprised that this wasn't an established scientific result.
There must be an awful lot of things which are very hard to prove in a proper controlled study, but which are totally obvious to anyone who tries them. To prove something about diet to everybody's satisfaction I'd have to get dozens of volunteers, compensate them properly for their time, carefully monitor what they eat, and worry about all sorts of experimental artifacts coming from the fact that they know they're taking part in a dietary experiment. As you can see in this thread, people are still complaining that this presumably-expensive experiment still doesn't really prove its point.
Alternatively, to prove it to my own satisfaction I can try it out for two weeks and see whether it works. And that's all I really care about.
> There must be an awful lot of things which are very hard to prove in a proper controlled study, but which are totally obvious to anyone who tries them.
The problem is lots of stuff that people think they know and is totally obvious is completely wrong and completely subjective. Science has a harder job, it has to prove things objectively.
The GI tract is exquisitely sensitive to stretch, which is one of the many "fullness" signals. So it's not unreasonable to guess that this is part of what occurs. The single most likely explanation behind the weight loss is that the consumption of water displaced some portion of calorie consumption, causing participants to eat fewer calories.
There's really not much more to know; it's a weight maintenance technique, since cellulose is indigestible. Force = mass*gravity and all that. The lighter they weigh, the more height they can achieve. Gymnasts have to worry about their weight for the same reason; that's why child gymnasts actually have an advantage over adult gymnasts, hence the Chinese gymnast boondoggle. But they can be stockier as they're always moving under their own power. Ballerinas are under even greater pressure to be light because their partners have to lift them.
I went googling but couldn't find any evidence of it actually happening; I did find this snopes thread in which it's discussed as a possible urban myth:
It seems to me unlikely, given that eating tissue paper is really difficult and in my opinion it would take far more willpower to force down enough tissue paper to induce satiety than it would to just stay hungry. It would be much easier to eat, say, a pound of celery, which would be calorifically indistinguishable from the paper.
Besides, real ballerinas must do a hell of a lot of exercise. I'm thinking they probably eat like athletes, not like teenagers with eating disorders.
Comments
Me and the significant other have known this for quite a while. Frankly, I'm REALLY surprised that this wasn't an established scientific result.
The way it works IMHO is not too obscure - water fills you up and gives you the impression of being 'full' earlier, so you tend to reduce your regular food intake. Feeling 'fuller' equates to being satiated for a lot of people (including me), so the tendency to chow out at random times during the day is highly reduced/eliminated.
I used to be 90+ kg in the middle of 2009. Once I decided to drink copious amounts of water during the day, by Jan 2010 I had come to about 60ish kg and lost 4 inches around the waist. My other breakfast/lunch/dinner eating habits remained the same, and the water meant I cut down on snacking between meals.
Seriously, isn't there any research showing water fills you up?
In the study, they controlled for caloric intake by giving everyone a limit. This would seem to point toward an effect other than the fact that water makes you eat less. It's possible that the group drinking water actually stayed below their caloric limit, but I didn't see that mentioned in the article.
I imagine it's hard to enforce caloric intake limits effectively. Perhaps people who drank water simply had more success staying within (or close to) the allocated limit.
Frankly, I'm REALLY surprised that this wasn't an established scientific result.
There must be an awful lot of things which are very hard to prove in a proper controlled study, but which are totally obvious to anyone who tries them. To prove something about diet to everybody's satisfaction I'd have to get dozens of volunteers, compensate them properly for their time, carefully monitor what they eat, and worry about all sorts of experimental artifacts coming from the fact that they know they're taking part in a dietary experiment. As you can see in this thread, people are still complaining that this presumably-expensive experiment still doesn't really prove its point.
Alternatively, to prove it to my own satisfaction I can try it out for two weeks and see whether it works. And that's all I really care about.
> There must be an awful lot of things which are very hard to prove in a proper controlled study, but which are totally obvious to anyone who tries them.
The problem is lots of stuff that people think they know and is totally obvious is completely wrong and completely subjective. Science has a harder job, it has to prove things objectively.
The GI tract is exquisitely sensitive to stretch, which is one of the many "fullness" signals. So it's not unreasonable to guess that this is part of what occurs. The single most likely explanation behind the weight loss is that the consumption of water displaced some portion of calorie consumption, causing participants to eat fewer calories.
Is it also possible that increased water in the bloodstream resulted in less food being stored as fat and/or more fat being used as energy?
No
Indeed. There's a reason ballerina dancers eat tissue paper.
Seriously? I want to know more.
There's really not much more to know; it's a weight maintenance technique, since cellulose is indigestible. Force = mass*gravity and all that. The lighter they weigh, the more height they can achieve. Gymnasts have to worry about their weight for the same reason; that's why child gymnasts actually have an advantage over adult gymnasts, hence the Chinese gymnast boondoggle. But they can be stockier as they're always moving under their own power. Ballerinas are under even greater pressure to be light because their partners have to lift them.
I went googling but couldn't find any evidence of it actually happening; I did find this snopes thread in which it's discussed as a possible urban myth:
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_to...
It seems to me unlikely, given that eating tissue paper is really difficult and in my opinion it would take far more willpower to force down enough tissue paper to induce satiety than it would to just stay hungry. It would be much easier to eat, say, a pound of celery, which would be calorifically indistinguishable from the paper.
Besides, real ballerinas must do a hell of a lot of exercise. I'm thinking they probably eat like athletes, not like teenagers with eating disorders.