I drink 1700+ calories a day via soft drinks (10 soft drinks @ 170 calories each daily).
I’ve decided I wanted to drop some weight and switched to water only, of which I’m drinking about eight 16 oz bottles a day.
I am 44 years old, female, 5’7", 161 lbs,sedentary, and do not practice good eating habits, but don’t plan on changing those now.
How can I calculate how much weight I will lose if I make no other dietary changes?
Thanks in advance for your help 
We can’t tell if you don’t tell us how many calories you’re still consuming via all other foods.
I think there are roughly 3500kcal per pound of fat. So, 1700kcal equates to roughly 0.5lbs.
If your daily energy usage at present (with soft drinks) is equal to your calorie intake then your weight would be constant. So by cutting 1700kcal you would lose 0.5lb/day.
However, if your daily energy usage isn’t equal to your present calorie intake you won’t lose any weight.
According to this fairly accurate metabolic calculator for your ht/wt/age/activity level your current metabolic burn rate is in the neighborhood of approx 1697 calories per day, so if you’re drinking 1700 sugar calories of sugar via soda a day the envelope of the equation doesn’t make much sense. You should weigh closer to 261 lbs you’re injesting that much soda a day, and maintain a sedentary activity level unless soda is the vast majority of your daily calorie intake.
As Qadgop and Szlater said, we don’t have enough information.
The difference between calorie intake and calorie use determines weight gain or loss. We know one part of that equation, which isn’t enough to solve it.
If you’ve been consuming the same number of calories for a while, and your weight has stabilized, you can assume what your intake is is what you use every day. Decreasing that by 1700 calories per day is significant.
If, however, your weight has been increasing, cutting the calories may only cause your weight to level off. If your weight has been decreasing, cutting calories will help it decrease faster.
Anecdote: I started being conscious of my weight and caloric intake about a year ago. The biggest single change I made was not drinking regular pop and using sweetener in tea, coffee and kool-aid-type drinks. I haven’t had a non-diet pop since, and I’ve been successful in losing a significant amount of weight and keeping it lost.
However, the diet drinks were NOT the only change I made, and I am certain I would not have lost as much weight as I have had they been the only change I made. However, I don’t imagine it would hurt.
I didnt only quit soft drinks in losing weight either but I would say they were probably one of the biggest single changes I made. There was an article I read the other day talking about what bad news they are because our brain basically doesnt recognise the calories in them at all in regards to deciding hunger levels and that made a lot of sense to me.
So Id strongly encourage it as a good move even if noone can tell you exactly what effect it will have.
Otara
Um, well, I’m not any good at math, but I did the same thing as you (about as many soft drinks a day, maybe a few less, and just went to diet pop), starting in Feb '04 to fit into my grad dress. By the time June '04 rolled around, I had lost about 15 pounds without any other changes in my diet or exercise.
I did the same as you and lost about 20 pounds in about six months. I’ll never go back to drinking sugar soda every day.
I’m lucky enough to have found a diet soda I can’t get enough of, though. Otherwise, I would’ve fallen off the wagon long ago.
Just me chiming in with much agreement. Liquid intake is probably the easiest way to cut back on calories. People rarely realize how many calories they consume by drinks.
For comparison:
12 oz can of coke: 145 Calories
12 oz Pineapple Juice: 180 Calories
12 oz Grape Juice: 192 Calories
12 oz Orange Juice 156 Calories
You drink 10 twelve-ounce cans of soda, and 8 sixteen-ounce bottles of water, each day? Wow- that’s a lot of fluid. I don’t know how much weight you’ll lose, but you must have the healthiest kidneys on the block!
IANAD, but if you decide to cut out all of the soda, I wouldn’t try to replace it all with more water. You’ll be at risk for over hydrating, and could cause yourself some serious problems. I only know this because I’m a marathoner, and I’ve read articles about how nobody has ever died from dehydration, but they have died from over hydration. So be careful.
Overhydration is really hard to do unless you’re running marathons or doing similar activity. That’s not to say that it’s impossible for a less active person to do, but they’d almost have to be working at it.
astro, there are a couple reasons why those metabolic calculators leave a lot to be desired. First off, your metabolism is tied pretty closely to your caloric intake–eat more, and you burn more. Add to that the thermic effect of food, and you’ve got a big source of error. Secondly, there’s a lot of room for individual variation there–the calculator doesn’t act on things like body fat percentage, cardiovascular fitness, genetics, etc. To get a really active picture, you’d need to track all of those things.
[emphasis mine]
Okay, you’re going to have to cite that to have any credibility whatsoever. Plenty of people have died from dehydration; it can be a serious problem even with sedentary lifestyles, and a severe problem for someone involved in strenuous activity.
Overhydration, on the other hand, is pretty rare. It can happen that excess hydration interferes with urea extraction by the kidneys, but this typically only happens with interveneous fluids. You’d have to drink a hellava lot of water–measured in tens of litres per day–before this could be an issue. With atheletes or hikers who are performing endurance activities, the real problem isn’t so much overhydration as it is electrolyte balance; running out of potassium, niacin, and sodium to maintain cellular energy extraction and nervous system processes. You’ll know long before this becomes a serious health problem, though, when your muscles start twitching and your vision begins to blur. Basically, as long as you’re drinking pure unadulterated water and replenishing the necessary eletrolytes, overhydration is a nonissue. (Mind you, having to stop every five minutes to take a leak might put a crimp on your marathon time, though.)
Back to the OP, not only is there insufficient calorie information to specifically answer your question, but also take into account that consuming large amounts of refined simple sugars also spikes insulin production, and your body attempts to make use of the excess energy in some way. Sans those readily available calories, your metabolism should adjust (assuming that there are no underlying health problems), so it’s not as if you’ll literally lose 1/2lb per day. In a sense, your metabolism “slows down”; you can initially expect to quickly lose some weight --how much depends on the rest of your diet and the amount of exercise in which you engage–and then more slowly drop weight until you plateau out to a new equilibrium. So even if you start out shedding, say, 5 lbs per week for the first couple of weeks, don’t expect that to continue indefinitely. Not to discourage you; removing a glut of otherwise nutrition-free carbohydrate calories from your diet is a healthy move for more than just weight reasons.
Good luck.
Stranger
I cannot comment specifically on the weight loss you would expect, due to reasons already mentioned.
I will note as anecdotal evidence that a few of the very overweight people at work have managed to lose from 10-20 pounds in a year by doing nothing other (intentionally) than dropping non-diet soda. These are people who only drank from 2-4 cans worth a day. About half of them backslid because they could not resist the siren song of non-diet soda.
Well, saying “nobody has ever died of dehydration” is probably over-stating it, but it’s true that we’re starting to recognize that hyponatremia is a much more common and serious problem than people recognize. Most people (particularly in races) are aware of the dehydration issue and drink adequately.
Here’s an article from the San Diego paper:
I couldn’t find the exact article but I had read that there hasn’t been a documented case of anyone dying of dehydration in a marathon but there have been deaths from nyponatremia. That’s probably the same article that McNew is thinking of.
I am replacing the root beer with water - sorry that wasn’t clear in my OP.
I only eat 1 meal + a couple of snacks a day, but my one meal is usually whatever the heck I want and as much as I want of it. That usually falls around lunch time, and may be a Beefeater sandwich from Jason’s, or a couple of beef meximelts from Taco Bell, or a meal deal from McDonald’s. Snacks are usually high calorie also, like chips, nuts, etc. (horrible diet, I know, but I’ll work on that later).
Does that help clarify my original question? Thanks for your responses!
… forgot to add that I’ve maintained the same weight for the last 2-3 years consuming the above.
Replacing the sodas with water will be a great help to you. And if you’re drinking root beer, you won’t even have to deal with caffeine withdrawels. Losing weight is a calculation of simply burning more calories than you are consuming/ processing. Sodas are one of the easiest things to give up because they don’t give you that “full” feeling that other high calorie items do (starches / carbs mostly). If you also cut out fries from your fast food purchases, your calorie intake would shrink dramatically.
I say all of this after losing ~40 lbs over the last two years, and am recently remotivated to lose another ~20.
You dont need any calorie counting or calculators to know that if your weight has been reasonably stable you can assume energy(in) = energy(out). In fact the only people for whom this isn’t true within a few percentage points or so of error are gaining or losing weight pretty damn fast. So they cancel. Therefore 1700 calories/day * (1 lb/3500 Kcal) = 0.48 lbs/day = about half a pound a day.
BUT. Since fat mass is regulated by the hypothalamus, there’s really no point in making back of the envelope calculations. This is not a simple thermodynamic problem from physics 101. This is a biological system that maintains homeostasis. If you’re typical, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% weight loss your appetite will increase and your metabolism will slow somewhat to compensate. In other words, the weight loss will level off. Some diets have faster initial weight loss but virtually all diets end up with more or less the same results. On average people lose about 8% of their weight. The vast majority regain within a few years. In large part because they find they’re wanting to eat more often and more at a meal. This is nothing to scoff at, since appetite is very tightly regulated and very few people can overcome this pressure over the years.
So let’s say you’re average then, you’ll lose - oh 10 or 15 lbs. You say you’re not willing ot change your at-will eating habits, which means you’ll probably regain it pretty quickly since your appetite will get a boost from the loss of fat tissue.
(don’t pay any attention to the naysayers. Hundreds if not thousands of people lose weight every day, hundreds if not thousands have made long-term changes and experienced long-term effects. Despite their trying to make you fail for whatever reason, it is possible to lose weight, and it is possible to maintain a lower weight for significant amounts of time)
Cutting out sodas is a great way to start making changes in your nutrition. Just don’t stop there! Take the next step to exercising and you’ll really see changes in your body composition. Exercising will keep your metabolism from slowing down to match your caloric intake, and so you can keep losing fat far longer than you would from dieting alone.
From tiny acorns and all that…
Good luck!