Promises, Promises

Nearly everyone who's ever gone on a diet makes the same sweeping promises: No more cookies! No more cake! No more french fries! No more pizza! But it turns out you likely to lose a lot more weight if you focused less on the foods you're going to give up and instead pledge to shun soda, fruit punch, sugary coffee drinks, and other high-calorie liquids, according to a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It found that cutting just one serving of a sugary drink each day results in additional weight loss of 1.1 pounds at six months and 1.54 pounds after 18 months of dieting, according to the study. Previous research has shown that most Americans dramatically underestimate how many calories they drink each day, and some public health officials have directly blamed the growing global obesity epidemic on the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, particularly soda.