I heard about The Bob Greene Diet from a friend who’d seen him on Oprah, and I was intrigued enough to pick up his book. Normally I hate diet books, but I was pleasantly surprised with the Bob Greene plan. Unlike Atkins, he wasn’t selling any quick fixes. The diet didn’t require a 1200-1300 calorie requirement like others on the market. Instead it focused on improving the quality of the food you eat and recommended anywhere between 1500-1800 calories diet plans.
Bob Greene recommends that you drink at least six glasses of water a day. Apparently, this is based on some research that people who drink an average of 6 1/2 cups of water during the day consume 200 fewer calories daily. Plus, water makes your skin look better and has other health benefits.
But getting six glasses of water a day isn’t as easy as you’d think. Tea, Coffee, Juice, and Diet Coke don’t count towards your water goal. And while I like the taste of some bottled waters and Vitamin Water, I don’t want to run through 6 bottles a day. It’s bad for my pocketbook as well as the environment. I filter my tap water to make it taste better, but I still found drinking so much plain unflavored liquid hard.
I like the taste of carbonated water (seltzer) with meals, but I don’t like the idea of throwing out so many bottles. I saw the Soda Club maker at a home show a month ago and bought one. It’s an easy solution for carbonating your own water. You can make the water as fizzy as you’d like, and they offer optional soda flavors to add. I prefer to just squeeze a little lemon juice in my carbonated water and skip the soda syrups, which taste ok to me but are noticeably different than Diet Coke.
Making seltzer costs less than buying it in the store (17 cents a bottle) and helps the environment since there are no bottles to throw away. Plus it helps me drink my six glasses of water a day.
