How to Lose Weight Series: Habit 1
- Pooja
- Jun 6, 2018
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 21, 2018
The Healthy Morning Ritual
My husband and I, have been having the magic portion of lemon — honey warm water for over 7 years now and it has always felt like a great morning ritual. We have found this to be an effective healthy habit which aids digestion and energises us in the mornings.
Now, the fact that drinking warm water as first thing in the morning itself has loads of health benefits, that cannot be overrated. According to the European Journal of Pharmaceutical and Medical Research, regularly drinking warm water, especially in the morning, can heal our bodies, provide digestive power and reduce metabolic waste that could have built in our immune system.
Besides, it also states that warm water increases body temperature, which therefore increases the metabolic rate. An increase in metabolic rate allows the body to burn more calories throughout the day. Drinking a glass of warm water along with a lemon will help break down the adipose tissue or body fat and also control food craving due to lemon’s pectin fibre.
In a study published on “Drinking Water is associated with Weight loss in Overweight Dieting Women Independent of Diet and Activity” — Data from short term experiments suggest that drinking water may promote weight loss by lowering total energy intake and/or altering metabolism.
Both Ayurvedic medicine and the Japanese water treatments are proponents for drinking a glass of warm water daily in the morning. So, now that we know having the warm glass of water is a great start to the day, ideally before you brush your teeth. It is great to have the practice instilled in our daily lives with the magic portion.
How to prepare the Magic Portion
1/2 — lemon
1 cup of water
1 tsp of organic honey
- Boil a cup of water and allow it to cool until it is just warm.
- Add 1 tsp of organic honey and squeeze half a lemon in the drink.
You would need to have this portion one sip at a time. Saliva in our mouth is alkaline in nature and its job is to stabilize the acid in our stomach. When we gulp a large amount of water at once, very less saliva gets mixed with the water, so the atmosphere inside the stomach remains acidic. This causes acidity, indigestion, bloating, gases etc and ultimately it causes weight gain and increases the cholesterol levels because stomach fails to absorb the essential nutrients from the food that we eat and remove unwanted material out of the body. In short, by drinking water in a wrong way, we are disturbing the natural process of the digestive system.
So you now have 235ml of water already in your system by having the magic portion.
If you can slowly increase the intake of plain warm water to 3 more cups after having the magic portion it would be of greater boost to your system.
It may not be possible to have all the 3 cups right away, would suggest you try and add one cup at a time per week and gradually enhance the number of cups.
The basic idea being the human body constitutes 60–70% of water. Hence, when the amount of water in our body reduces, we face health problems since our organs can’t function without water. When we are able to have nearly 4 cups of water first thing in the morning we are basically having 1 litre of water at the start of the day which is nearly 12.5% of the daily intake required by the body.
It is advisable though that we do not have anything to eat for 45 minutes after having the water. We should not over do this either since it could lead to adverse effects.
References:
Comments