Whatever happened to good ol’ water with a squeeze of lemon? Eeesh.
I do give them bonus points for using real sugar in their drinks, though, as opposed to the umpteen million artificially-sweetened “flavoured water beverages” that seem to be all the rage lately. Why oh why would someone ruin perfectly good green tea with Splenda??? AARGH.
Since we are wandering off topic, I have read that situps aren’t very necessary if you regularly do other exercises. For example if you exercise arms, legs and back your abdomen will get a workout by supporting your body through those exercises. Sounds good to me as situps are my least favourite. Anyone hear something similar?
I like water this way. Putting a couple sliced cucumber pieces in water also gives a really nice flavor.
Run a marathon and you burn the calorie equivalent of just around one pound.
26+ miles of running and you might have nixed a pound of body fat. The human body is EXTREMELY frugal on calories.
I think calories seem ‘little’ to people. A calorie is a big powerful chunk of something.
2000 steps in one mile. 52,000 in a marathon. 3500 cals in a pound of fat. That’s something like 15 steps from one calorie. The math here isn’t perfect because some runner strides are longer than a step, but the point is that a calorie is not ‘little’ or some small unit.
It depends on how you want your midsection to look. If you want a six-pack of hunka-hunka burnin’ abs, then you’ll need to do exercises that work that specific area. Sit-ups aren’t the best for that, though.
If you just want a semi-toned look to your abdomen, cardio plus a regular exercise regimen (like the one you outlined above) that works your muscles to exhaustion will accomplish that.
If it’s the flavor and not the sweetness you want, those little bottle of extract are great and cheep. Dip toothpick in flavor, swirl in tapwater, water tastes good, has .0000001 calories, and, lasts for a long time.
The only down side is that the bottles are like 50% alcohol and they won’t let you bring them to work.
To think that in the unenlightened old days, we got water for free from this thing called the “tap”, and if we wanted to get really wild and crazy, we put a slice of lemon in it. Zero calories, zero cost.
Boy, were we nuts… :rolleyes:
Hey! Lemons are expensive! It’s not like they grow on trees!
[sub]Well, not in Ontario, anyways…[/sub]
If you want “washboard” abs you still need to do ab exercises a couple times a week. Also, those other exercises only help your core if you do them with freeweights. Avoid the machines.
Exactly right. In fact what we call a calorie is actually a kilocalorie.
For those of you who do drink flavored waters, what’s the draw? Is it the flavor? The sweetness? A combination?
The taste of flavored water has always thrown me off. I think it’s the sweetness I find so off-putting. The first time I tasted it, I was expecting just what the name implied - water with a little flavor. The sweet taste was overpowering and made the water less refreshing to me, perhaps because I associate a taste like that with caffeinated diet sodas. I second the fruit juice idea - a squeeze of citrus goes a long way.
WARNING! Tap water contains potenitally deadly dihydrogen monoxide!
Sailboat
I add a bit of fruit juice to my water. Lately I’ve been on a lime kick. It gives a nice clean citrus taste with a bit of a tartness.
I like flavored waters but most of them, like the zero calorie stuff, has Splenda which tastes like overly sweetened ass to me. I’m guessing that’s what was in the flavored water that you tried.
I am trying to get away from sodas and carbonated beverages but plain water gets a bit boring and adding a lemon or lime would be nice but frankly fruit is expensive and doesn’t last very long either.
<hijack>Calculating calories vs exercise in this manner is a fun way to use math, but it does NOT reflect the real life results of anyone who chooses to lose weight by training for a marathon. In fact, it can be discouraging to those contemplating an aerobic training regimen to lose weight. I know you didn’t mean this, but it sounds like the central message of the post is ‘Aerobic exercise won’t help you lose weight - even running a marathon will only lose you a single pound’. (I was actually told this several times as a way of discouraging me from starting an exercise regimen, believe it or not.)
To put it in perspective, the average person needs around 2,000 calories of food per day. If running a marathon burns 3500 calories, it means the runner has burned off almost two days worth of food intake in around four hours. Add that to the minimum four months of training, where the runner is doing several miles a day, and you can quickly see how many day’s worth of food intake is being burned out of body fat.
It’s also worth noting that those who engage in frequent aerobic exercise generally burn more calories over the course of a day even when they’re not working out. To put it another way, if they guy sitting on his ass in the cubicle next to you is a distance runner and you aren’t, then right now he’s burning more calories than you even though he’s just sitting there and typing on his keyboard same as you. These are calories he’s losing on top of the ones he already lost when he ran a couple miles this morning.
Sorry to go so far off topic. After losing around 100 pounds and keeping it off for years, this is an important distinction to me.</hijack>
I’ll drink tap water at home, but not at work. It’s pretty nasty.
Yeah, yeah, but Penn and Teller said…
Penn and Teller have never seen what comes out of the tap at my job.
Well, the lemon juice probably has a few calories in it, but yeah! My tap water is hydroly delicious.
Well that’s your fault for confusing the sink with a dialysis machine.
For those who like their water to actually taste like something;
For Work Purposes, I sometimes fill my one liter (33.6 oz) water bottle with one can of;
Brisk, usually Raspberry, or
Nestea Iced Tea, or
Minute Maid Lite (10 calories)
Then the rest of the way with filtered tap water and ice.
Heck, the Cherry Limeaid Minute Maid Lite is horrible brutal NASTY straight, but diluted out in a one liter jug, it’s pretty refreshing, especially on a hot day.
And there we have it. An entire liter of flavored water for at most, about 33 cents. Using the MML, it’s only 10 calories too.
Really? I want to buy gasoline where you do. My Aquafina comes in 16.9 oz bottles. I pay 5.31 (including tax) for 32 of them. That's .17/each bottle. I need 7.57 bottles per gallon, which means that I pay $1.29 per gallon of the expensive, brand-name water versus 3.06/gallon for the cheap-ass, with a .03 per gallon discount gas. Last time I checked, $1.29 per gallon is less, not more than $3.06.
As to the OP, agreed. One of my biggest peeves is with all of the calorie-free sweeteners on the market “diet” drinks with calories grate my nerves. That being said, kudos to Crystal Light for truth in labels. Even though companies are not required IIRC to list calories less than 10 per serving, CL lists their water mixers as having 5 calories per serving. Although other companies use the same sweeteners – they list themselves as 0 calories.
I like the old house well water iron taste. They need to offer something like that for older folks.