Truly serious about getting rid of those love handles? Then make sure you clean your refrigerator of sweetened beverages. They might seem like harmless little bottles and cans that provide you with ultimate and that much-needed quench when you feel thirsty, but they're not something you should be consuming on a regular basis, particularly if you're trying to lose weight. How come? Read on to find out.

Soda, cola, diet cola, beer, coffee and processed fruit juices fall under the category of sweetened and diuretic drinks. They don't contribute to your weight loss efforts since they contain ingredients that do not work towards helping you lose weight but rather contribute towards helping you gain it. These ingredients include sugar, sugar substitutes and caffeine.

Sugar impedes your weight loss efforts because it contains empty calories. Apart from the unnecessary calories that it adds to your waist line, sugar contains no active ingredients that are beneficial for the body. Sugar that is refined has undergone a lot of processing and as a result has been stripped of all the vitamins and minerals it originally contained in its unprocessed state. It also releases energy too quickly for it to be of any use for the body. High-fructose corn syrup, a sugar that is commonly used to prepare soda, is particularly guilty of causing weight gain. In fact, it has been blamed as the culprit behind the continued rise of obesity in the nation today.

Some manufacturers try to make their sweetened beverages more acceptable to the health conscious public by boasting that they use sugar substitutes like aspartame that will supposedly lessen your sugar intake. The problem is, because our taste buds will expect to taste the sweetness of sugar, it will stop glucose production on cue since it will assume to get it from the sugar. But the sugar substitute will only give way less of what the tongue expects to get from it, so naturally, you will add more. This causes you to overeat sugars and carbohydrates, further taking you away from your weight loss goal. This is the reason why substituting your soda with its diet versions is not the solution to your soda craving. On the contrary, it will cause you to consume more soda than what you would normally take with a regular soda!

Caffeine, meanwhile, is a substance that is also used in some sweetened beverages that serves to impede your efforts to lose all fat. When you drink caffeine, your body will drain the fluid equivalent from the coffee plus an extra one third. This might seem good at first since you will lose water weight, but in the long run, the constant diuretic action of caffeine will signal your body to conserve water and retain it. This causes you to gain all the water weight, making you look more rotund than ever before. Beer is a diuretic drink even if it has no caffeine and follows the same mode of action, further explaining the infamous "beer belly" beer drinkers are known for.