Lose Weight Program > Water and Weight Gain

If you could find a pleasant way of drying yourself up, you could immediately reduce your weight about 70 per cent by removing all water from your body.

This "drying" out process is well known to prize fighters who are forced to trim down to a specified weight. By restricting liquid intake and at the same time increasing perspiration through vigorous pummeling of sparring partners, they are able to lose several pounds of water in a brief time. An hour's boxing match can take off as much as seven or eight pounds of pugilistic weight.

Reducing salts, steam baths, strenuous exercise, and similar measures can take the water out of you too - but your fat quotient is changed very little. Water lost by exercise or other means is invariably replaced because it is humanly impossible to avoid water intake over any great period. Even if you restrain yourself from drinking water, you are bound to get it in food, for even such a dry substance as smoked ham is more than half water.

It is only human to be respectful of things that are expensive, and on that basis water deserves your highest esteem. Father Joseph J. Sullivan, head of the chemistry department of Holy Cross College, has calculated the dollars-and-cents value of the water we buy in common foods. Taking 25 cents per 1,000 gallons as the average price of drinking water from the tap, he has found that:

Water in cabbage costs over $100 per 100 cubic feet. Carrots contain water costing $164 per 100 cubic feet. Asparagus provides water at a rate of $1,000 per 100 cubic feet. Corn on the cob taxes you $2,500 per 100 cubic feet for its water content.

And - look out! - 100 cubic feet of water yielded by eggplant, cucumber, or broccoli costs you anywhere from $5,000 to $6,000! Mother Nature knows how to turn a neat profit on her raw materials, but it would be churlish to make a fuss about it, for these succulent foods would be about as flavorsome as old gunny sacks if the water were removed.

Water is more necessary than food; from one point of view it is food. Water is the great temperature regulator, the basic fluid medium for all the body's processes, and the supply is guarded zealously. The brain contains water in practically the same proportion as milk. You'd better have water in the brain, or else.

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