Smoothies make tasty, refreshing snacks or light meals. While they can also serve as weight-loss aids, there's no guarantee that they will help you slim down. Depending on what it contains, a smoothie can be a nutritious and low-calorie meal replacement or a sugar-packed, high-calorie snack that is more likely to lead to weight gain than weight loss.
Nutrition Facts
Whether or not you will be able to lose weight with smoothies depends on your total calorie intake as well as the smoothie's ingredients. If you keep your serving sizes in check, you're likely to have greater success. An 8-oz. serving of a peach mango smoothie has about 90 calories, 3 g protein, no fat, 19 g carbohydrates and 18 g sugar. But a 24-oz. peach smoothie at a major juice chain has 460 calories, 4 g protein, 2 g fat, 108 g carbohydrates and an astonishing 90 g sugar. If you're buying your smoothies, check nutrition facts and ingredient labels carefully, and avoid drinks that have a lot of added sugar or artificial ingredients.
Benefits
Healthy, nutritious smoothies hold a number of benefits over other potential weight-loss foods. For one, they tend to contain a lot of fresh or frozen fruit. The dietary fiber in fruits can aid healthy weight loss and weight maintenance, and fruits' vitamins and minerals can contribute to reducing risks for cancer, diabetes, bone loss, stroke, kidney stones and heart attack.
Risks
There are potential risks to using smoothies as a weight-loss aid. If you drink too many of them at the expense of other healthy foods, you may develop nutrient deficiencies. Even if your smoothies are fortified with vitamins and minerals, you may not be getting as many advantages as you would with whole foods, which also contain protective antioxidants and phytochemicals. It's also worth noting that you can gain weight by drinking smoothies, especially if you have large portions or if you drink them as snacks in addition to regular meals.
Meal Replacements
The most successful way to lose weight with smoothies may be to make them with soy protein powder and use them as occasional meal replacements. According to a study published in the November 2003 "Nutrition Journal," researchers found that overweight and obese participants in a 40-week trial who used soy-based meal replacements lost more weight than those who followed a more traditional low-calorie diet. If you want to use a smoothie as a meal replacement, choose one that contains a balance of carbohydrates, lean protein and healthy fat, and make sure it contains at least 250 calories so that it can keep you full for more than a couple of hours.
References
- "Nutrition Journal"; Results of Soy-Based Meal Replacement Formula on Weight, Anthropometry, Serum Lipids & Blood Pressure During a 40-week Clinical Weight Loss Trial; Kevin R. Fontaine, et al.; November 2003
- LIVESTRONG.com MyPlate: Calories in Smoothie -- Peach Pleasure
- USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory: V8 Splash Smoothies, Peach Mango
- ChooseMyPlate.gov; Why Is It Important to Eat Fruits?; May 2011
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