● Processed Commercial Juices/Drinks/Sports Drinks

Unless store-bought fruit and vegetable juices and drinks are marketed as raw and fresh, they are cooked and processed, wiping out all enzymes and many vitamins. Basically, all you’re getting is cooked, concentrated fruit sugar, usually with added chemicals and preservatives.

Furthermore, many fruit juices and drinks contain additional refined sugars, unless they specifically say "unsweetened." Believe it or not, even those that say "no sugar added," may have added some form of refined sugar. Processed vegetable juices fare no better. They’re usually loaded with salt, sugar, and questionable manmade chemicals for flavoring and preserving.

Regardless of what has been added to processed juices and drinks, they offer you too many calories for too few nutrients. Read the label before you drink. If a juice or drink contains added sugars, salt, preservatives, colorants, or if it’s pasteurized, it depletes you, not feeds, and adds calories to the calories, which adds fat to the fat.

● Milk

Milk and dairy products are associated with all kinds of problems, small and large, like stuffiness, nasal drip, colds, sinus headaches, constipation, stomach upsets, PMS, asthma, bronchitis, eczema, psoriasis, bedwetting, hormone-fed cancers (breast, prostate, lung, colon), atherosclerosis, heart disease, and auto-immune diseases, such as type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.

Sidestepping the emotionally-charged dairy debate, look objectively at the calories you consume with a glass of milk. An 8-ounce glass of "fat-free" milk has 90 calories; 1% low fat, 100 calories; and whole milk, 180 calories. Three "fat-free" glasses of milk in one day adds 270 calories to your daily caloric intake. Just one daily glass of "fat-free" milk totals up to 630 calories in a week.

Bottom line question: Are those extra calories worth it to you? As always, it’s your body, your choice.

● Alcohol

At this point in your life, you know that alcohol is good for two things – getting tipsy and adding calories. Two glasses of red wine (340 calories), for example, contain more calories than a large, fill-you-up salad, an entire lunch, chocked full of nutrients. Cutting out alcohol is an easy way to cut down calories. Simple.

3. Ask yourself: "What are the best beverage choices?"

If coffee, soda, protein drinks, sports drinks, and commercial juices and drinks deplete you, what’s left to drink?

● Water

Of all the dozens of different drinks now commercially marketed, water is the best at its job: hydrating. And it comes with zero calories, zero chemicals, zero sugar, and zero salt, all for the price of zero dollars. Drinking water restores fluids in our bodies, which we lose constantly through elimination, breathing, and sweating.

Interestingly enough, water neither feeds nor depletes. It’s neutral, but critical for a well-functioning body. The same goes for herbal teas that say "naturally caffeine-free," list only plants as ingredients, and contain no manmade chemicals.

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