Brace yourself for a shock: Some 10 to 14% of your daily calories don't come from food at all, according to the USDA. They sneak through in beverages that wash down those calorie-counted meals. How's that possible? Consider this: One cafe latte for breakfast, one can of soda at lunch, and a fruit smoothie snack can blow your daily budget by 550 calories!
While tasty going down, liquid calories don't register on your appetite meter the way solid food does, so those excess calories can add up fast. Likewise, making a few shrewd beverage swaps could trick your body into accepting fewer calories without cutting back on food. The exceptions, of course, are calcium-rich, low-fat dairy, or soy milk or antioxidant-rich tomato, orange, or Concord grape juice. But if you root out another 200 liquid calories a day, you could drop as much as 20 lbs in a year--without your stomach even noticing.

Kick the Can
The first place to look? Sweetened soft drinks. A recent study found that the average American drinks 41 gallons of sugared soft drinks a year. "That's a pound of pop a day," says Michael Finke, PhD, of the University of Missouri in Columbia. "Remember that 16 oz of sugared soda represents 200 calories right there."
Dr. Finke discovered that all those sweet drinks make it practically impossible to eat right. "The more soda the subjects drank, the greater likelihood they weren't getting the RDAs of the 14 essential vitamins and minerals that we studied," he points out. Biggest losses: bone-building calcium and heart protective folate.

Drinks on a Diet


LOSE THESE
Fruit smoothie-250 cal
Juice drinks-130 cal
Sweetened iced teas-80 cal
Sweetened soft drinks-100 cal
Flavored coffee drinks-200 cal
Tequilla sunrise-273 cal
Gin and tonic-170 cal
Bloody Mary-130 cal
Rose wine-160 cal
CHOOSE THESE
Diet V8 Splash-10 cal
Ocean Spray Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice-40 cal
Diet Lemon Lipton-0 cal
Decaf Sugar-Free Nestea, powder-5 cal
Fruit-flavored seltzer-15 cal
Taster's Choice Hazelnut, Vanilla, or Chocolate Roast Instant with 1% milk and Splenda-30 cal
Giroux grenadine (1 Tbsp) and diet ginger ale (8 oz)-50 cal
Splash of basalmic vinegar in seltzer-1 cal
Tabasco Bloody Mary Mix (4 oz) and seltzer (4 oz)-30 cal
Inglenook Alcohol Removed White Zinfandel-60 cal