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When it comes to weight loss, substituting healthy drinks for those sugary sodas and energy drinks can have a drastic effect on your weight loss goals. Most people don’t realize how many calories they take in each day from drinks alone. For instance, a caffe mocha with all the fixings can pack in over 500 calories! So as you can see, switching to healthier drinks and ditching the “junk drinks” will greatly reduce your daily caloric intake and in return start shredding those unwanted pounds. Check out this list of the top 10 healthy drinks that can help you reach your weight loss goals…

Vegetable Juice

Vegetable juice is every bit as nutritious as fruit juice but with about half the calories. Most vegetable juices are also rich in fiber which can help make you feel full and in turn eat less.

Fruit Smoothies

Mix-up a delicious batch of smoothies using your favorite fruits and a little bit of skim milk. Do not consume smoothies with added sugar, whipped cream, honey, or other sweeteners that can add hundreds of calories – in other words, don’t eat smoothies from your favorite local restaurant or ice-cream shop and think that you’re eating healthy because you’re not!

Fruit Juice

Fruit juices have loads of vitamins and nutrients, but it’s important to make sure that there’s no added sugar…sorry Sunny D and Tang! Also remember that the pulpier, the better. Fruit juice with lots of pulp contains added fiber that can help you feel more full and eat less.

Black Coffee

Coffee has plenty of positive health benefits and best of all, it contains no calories! Black coffee is rich in antioxidants that can help boost your mood, improve concentration, reduce the risk of diabetes and cancer, as well as many other benefits. Keep you coffee consumption at 4 cups or less per day – as with anything, moderation is the key.

Green Tea

Like coffee, green tea has a plethora of positive health benefits and contains plenty of helpful antioxidants. It also helps to boost your metabolism if consumed on a daily basis, which can help to speed up your body’s fat-burning mechanism – as much as a 40% increase in some cases!

Milk

The calcium in Low-fat or skim milk can help contribute to the breakdown of fat cells in your body. Too much milk, though, can pack on the pounds because it does contain a lot of calories, so stick to 3-4 small servings per day in order to benefit from milk’s weight loss benefits.

Protein Drinks

Protein drinks, such as from powders or pre-mixed varieties, can have a great effect on your weight loss regiment, because lean muscle is very efficient at burning fat. In other words, the more muscle you have, the more fat your body will burn. Protein is a big part of this equation, because it’s the building block of muscle growth.

Fiber Drinks

There’s many fiber-rich drinks on the market today, and they can be a great tool for any weight loss program. Fiber helps to make your body feel full, and it also has plenty of other positive health benefits as well.

Apple Cider Vinegar

Sounds a little gross, and it may be too gross for some people to try, but apple cider vinegar is a sort-of “old school” health drink that was very popular in the ’70s as a weight loss tool. Although there aren’t any scientific studies that actually prove it works, many fitness gurus swear by it, saying that it greatly boosts your metabolism if taken regularly…Hey, it’s worth a try!

Ice Water

Probably the most powerful weight loss tool at your disposal, and also the cheapest, is plain old ice water (who’d a thunk!). Drinking plenty of water is great for your body because it helps you feel full, boosts your metabolism, and it contains zero calories. Furthermore, some studies suggest that drinking just two extra glasses of ice water per day can help boost your metabolism by as much as 30%. This equates to about 5 pounds of fat loss per year!