Fitness Friday with Siphiwe Baleka

Trucking-Jobs

THE EFFECT OF DRINKING SODA: A CASE STUDY

We have all heard that if you want to lose weight, stop drinking soda and switch to water. Let’s take a look at an actual case study from Prime’s Driver Health and Fitness (DHF) Program.

We are going to look at the actual data from a driver whom we will call “Joe.” Joe started the DHF program at 252.8 lbs. and a BMI of 33.3. During the week of April 14th  to April 20th, Joe averaged 3,361 steps per day and 1 hour and 29 minutes of moderate activity. Joe burned an average of 3344 calories a day and consumed an average of 2613 calories per day. That gave Joe an average daily calorie deficit of 731 calories. That’s an estimated weight loss of 1.46 lbs. per week.

 

But weight loss is not just about calories. Several other factors are equally important, if not more important. One of those factors is carbohydrate consumption. Carbohydrates supply the body with energy. When you eat carbohydrates, the body metabolizes it. If your body doesn’t need the energy right then and there, the carbohydrate will be converted to fat for storage. When a driver sits behind the wheel for ten hours, he doesn’t need a whole lot of energy so most carbohydrates that drivers consume get stored as fat.

Here is Joe’s physical activity profile for that same week:Fitness-Friday

Most of the days, Joe did not get any “vigorous” activity, so a lot of Joe’s carbohydrates were stored as fat and never burned off! Below is Joe’s food log for Sunday, April 14, 2013:Fitness-Friday

As you can see, on that day, Joe consumed 2920 calories and 419g of carbs. How many carbs is too many carbs? Well, all of that depends. BUT, when you consume about 125g of carbs or less per day, your body goes into a state of “ketosis”. When that happens, your body doesn’t get enough energy from the carbs that you eat. In order to get through the day, your body has to start burning fat. When that happens, you burn fat while you are driving. A lot of the drivers that I work with start the program at about 200g of carbs per day.  So Joe’s 419g of carbs on April 14th was A LOT of carbs! As you can see, Joe drank soda four times on that day for a total of 257g of carbs. Joe’s soda drinking accounted for 61.3% of his carbohydrates for the entire day. And all that soda was stored as fat!

Here was Joe’s soda profile for the entire week:Prime-inc

What can Joe do about this? Joe can reduce 212g of carbs each day just by switching to any zero calorie, zero carb drink. That would bring Joe’s carb consumption down to just 156.1g per day. At that rate, Joe is getting near the level of ketosis and can accelerate fat burning by about 10-fold! In thirteen weeks, I estimate that Joe could lose about 20 lbs. just from that single change alone! That’s 7.9% of Joe’s body weight and enough weight loss to reduce his risk for 60 medical disorders including 12 types of cancer. The sooner Joe stops drinking these sodas, the sooner Joe starts saving his life.

If you’re interested in the Driver Health and Fitness program, check out www.driverhealthandfitness.com and connect with us on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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