Body transformations are our favourite thing here at DMARGE. There’s simply nothing better than seeing dudes who’ve been struggling with their weight and, often, their mental health find their route to turning it all around. In an effort to spread their fitness success, we share some of those incredible stories here.

However, as we continue to scour the internet for success stories, we’ve begun to notice a trend that we think more guys need to know about before embarking on their weight loss journeys. Strangely, it has nothing to do with (what most people consider to be) the biggest pillars of weight loss: what you eat or how you workout.

Instead, all the stories we’ve attached here touch on one massively underrated nutritional pillar: what you drink. And, for the most part, this takes two prevalent forms. First, there are those that quit drinking, in the sense that they quit drinking alcohol.

This has become much more readily acceptable amongst men in recent years as societal pressure to drink has lapsed and discourse around just how bad alcohol can be for your physical body but also your mental health has come to the fore.

As the below body transformer — who, interestingly, is in his forties, a time in their lives when many blokes come to have something of a reckoning with their drinking habits and overall health — makes clear in one concise statement:

“So many empty calories…”

u/EyeFlyNE

The other kind of drinking reform that many guys are now embracing has less to do with alcohol and far more to do with the massive amounts of sugar that many soft drinks contain and the resultant effects these can have on your body’s inner workings; more and more men are quitting soda.

As the below poster — this time, a guy in his mid-twenties who has lost a whopping 77 pounds — notes: the very casual, day-to-day soda drinking that is especially common in the United States, but also in many developed parts of the world, can make weight loss so much harder, allowing people to unknowingly consume huge amounts of calories that don’t fill them up or stave off overeating.

M/25/5’9 [251lb > 174lb = 77lb] trust me, if I can do it… You can too! Getting in the routine is the hardest part.
byu/nostalgicbafoon inprogresspics

He summarises better than I could:

“If you drink a lot of pop, stop… I promise that will pay off instantly… the second you finish a full Pepsi or whatever your body is spending the rest of the day processing the sugar content which slows down every other process. Switch to carbonated water, learn to like it, and you want even wanna drink pop anymore… I feel like this change was the best thing I did for myself.”

u/nostalgicbafoon

We want to caveat all this by saying something obvious but important: what you drink — alcoholic or otherwise — is only one pillar in a wider effort towards weight loss and a healthier life. You will need to adjust other areas of your nutrition — particularly focusing on a CICO (calories in, calories out) approach — and also get more active, whether that’s weightlifting, sports, or anything else.

Have you ditched the drinks? Softs booze, or both? And how did you find it? Let us know.