Am I Crazy?

How much could dehydration blunt one’s goals of muscle/strength gain and fat loss? In the last couple of years i have found it almost impossible to strip off any noticeable amount of bodyfat. In frustration, i have shaped my nutrition to about 95% of what Berardi recommends on his Don’t Diet plan, but i have continued to drink a lot of diet sodas.(I have a wicked caffeine habit and crave sugar without the cals)

Given that i haven’t dranken enough water to compensate for the diuretic effect of massive amounts of diet sodas, do you think this dehydration would blunt any improvements upon my bodyfat and strength routine? Recently i upped the water and backed off on the caffeine and have finally got some results.

Am i losing it or does lack of water cause this much damage even when you are following everthing else to a T?

BUMP

In all probability, this is not the culprit.

Diuretic effect of diet sodas are through their caffeine content.

Caffeine content of sodas range between 35 to 55 mg per 12 fluid ounces (355 ml).

Diet coke has 45mg per 355 ml

That means that the equivalent of one regular coffee cup (the small 7 fl. ounces) represents 710 mL.

While on EC stacks people take in between 200 to 250 mg of caffein with their ephedrine 2 to 3 times per day for weightloss purposes…that means about 2 L of diet Coke 2 to 3 times a day.

So even with the ephedrine component in the weightloss process, that is still about 4 to 6L of diet soda (in terms of equivalency).

Do you drink 4 to 6L of diet soda a day?

Hell I can drink about 4L of diet soda a day and still lose weight. Caffeine as a diuretic is pretty weak and when you take it in pill form (without liquids as in coffee or sodas, people hardly notice any change in urinary habits).

So long story short…look elsewhere to figure out while you’re not losing the fat you want.

Cheers,
AlexH

I’ve lost fat with no problem in the past while drinking 1-2 liters of soda a day on average. But i was drinking at least a gallon of H20 a day back then. I was recently drinking only a couple of glasses of water and 3 liters of soda. I have noticed now that when i upped my water to 1-2 gallons and limited my soda that fat burning has seemed to resume. My question is whether a severe dehydration could cause fat loss to be impaired.

[quote]archangel1 wrote:
I’ve lost fat with no problem in the past while drinking 1-2 liters of soda a day on average. But i was drinking at least a gallon of H20 a day back then. I was recently drinking only a couple of glasses of water and 3 liters of soda. I have noticed now that when i upped my water to 1-2 gallons and limited my soda that fat burning has seemed to resume. My question is whether a severe dehydration could cause fat loss to be impaired. [/quote]

Perhaps the diet soda made you hold some water, accounting for that “fat”. It’s not hard to mistake water retention for fat. Just a thought.

[quote]bushidobadboy wrote:
Well since ‘impaired’ means (to me) less than optimal, of course dehydration would ‘impair’ fatloss. BUT, are you dehydrated? What colour is your piss?[/quote]

Oh, it was mountain dew at best. I was dehydrated, no doubt. Once again, i’ve returned to drinking 1-2 gallons a day with minimal soda with results. I’m just trying to understand why i wasn’t losing.

2L of Mountain Dew represents about 310 mg of caffeine.

So that’s 3 coffees.

This is not dehydrating you, or the proper term being volume depletion.

(Dehydration reprensents a lack of whole body water and implies a change in electrolytes. Volume depletion represents a loss of both water and salt and maintains electrolyte concentrations. Volume depletion can occure with or without dehydration.)

Like I said, caffeine sucks as a diuretic.

It has been shown that at and below 300 mg daily, caffeine has the same diuretic activity as water (water has diuretic activity [pressure/volume diuresis]. So basically, no effect at or below 300 mg for effective diuresis.
Also that means that at 300 mg of caffeine, any liquid (water in the liquid) taken with the caffeine (either in pills or or dissolved in liquid) represents a net volume excess and cannot cause volume depletion.

Therefore, no, you are not being volume depleted by 2 liters of Mountain Dew a day.

The subcutaneous water retention theory might have something to it. Cause if you were being volume depleted, chances are you would look leaner, like people who take diuretics before bodybuilding shows.

Cheers,
AlexH

As to why things are working now, no real idea, but it probably ain’t this.

i am pretty sure he meant the color of his piss was mountain dew- at best, which would make him pretty dehydrated if thats what color it was “at best”. by chance, was it sunkist at worst?

Ahahaha,

I just read diagonally and didn’t even think someone using a soft drink as a urine color reference and since I don’t drink any, I have no idea what color it is except it must be pale.

Thanks for the correction.

AlexH

[quote]Dandalex wrote:
2L of Mountain Dew represents about 310 mg of caffeine.

So that’s 3 coffees…

Like I said, caffeine sucks as a diuretic.[/quote]

Exactly. To top it off, the diuretic effects so often spouted by people with a little knowledge (i.e. dangerous), point to short-term studies.

In these shorter studies, people are given greater doses of caffeine for a short period of time and their urin output measured.

There are a few long-term, cross-sectional studies which have noted that the diuretic effect of caffeine is greatly diminished (to the point of non-existence) in long-time caffeine users — or in my case abusers.