Before you begin the The 7-Day Flat-Belly Tea Cleanse, take a moment to think about your past drinking habits. No, not that time in college when you got arrested for streaking through the quad at 1 am. I mean the stuff you drink every day: sodas, sweet teas, energy drinks, lattes, juices and the like. The average American now drinks about a gallon of soda a week. Add to that our odd new habits of swapping tap water for bottled "vitamin" water (+120 calories) and giving up plain iced coffee for Mocha Frappucinos (+520 calories) and you can see how quickly the calories add up--and that''s before chugging an "energy drink" that tastes exactly like what would happen if a crazed pastry chef hijacked a truckload of Smarties and drove it into a battery acid factory (another 280 calories). Those three drinks alone give you 920 additional calories--almost half a day''s worth! In fact, liquid calories now make up a whopping 21 percent of our daily calorie intake--more than 400 calories every single day, more than twice as much as we drank 30 years ago. To give you a perspective on those numbers, imagine taking two slices of Pizza Hut Thin ''N Crispy Pepperoni Pizza, tossing them in a blender and hitting "puree," then drinking the whole thing down. That''s 420 calories.

Now imagine that the typical American has been doing this every single day for years. Wow. Disgusting, right? Yes, but behind those slightly sickening statistics comes some great news. Because if you want to strip away pounds, shrink your belly, and begin to sculpt a leaner, fitter body--while also boosting your health, calming your mind and fighting back against some of the most significant diseases of our time--just changing what you drink could be all you need. One study at Johns Hopkins University found that people who cut liquid calories from their diets lose more weight--and keep it off longer--than people who cut food calories. Simply cutting out liquid calories--by switching your usual drink to tea--could save you nearly 42 pounds this year alone! (Sorta makes that genie look real, doesn''t it?) So to start using the Tea Cleanse, you first have to rid yourself of the liquid toxins your body has been piling up. Here''s how to do it: STEP 1: Swear Off the Soda and Bottled Teas ANNUAL WEIGHT LOSS: 12 pounds According to the National Institutes of Health, the third largest source of food calories in the American diet isn''t a food at all. It''s soda.

We get more calories from soda every day than we do meat, dairy or anything other than baked goods. How can that be possible? Because of all the sugar. Mountain Dew, for example, not only delivers 52 grams of sugar per 12-ounce can, but gives you a delicious side helping of bromated vegetable oil, a component of rocket fuel. And I don''t mean metaphorical rocket fuel--I mean the stuff they actually put in the engines to keep the gears from exploding. STEP 2: Don''t Drink Juice Drinks ANNUAL WEIGHT LOSS: 19 pounds If the FDA ever forces drink manufacturers to start properly labeling their products, SunnyD would have to be called Obesi-D. (Some versions of the brand have up to 180 calories and 40 grams of sugar per serving.) Most of these "juice" drinks are really just water and high fructose corn syrup. If you drink just one of these a day, cut it out--you''ll lose 19 pounds this year! STEP 3: Trade Coffee Drinks for Tea ANNUAL WEIGHT LOSS: 25 pounds Researchers studied the coffee habits of New Yorkers and discovered that two-thirds of Starbucks customers opted for blended coffee drinks over regular brewed coffee or tea.

The average caloric impact of the blended drinks was 239 calories. Switch to tea just once a day and you''d lose 25 pounds this year! (Actually, you may lose more, as coffee has been linked to belly fat storage. A research team in Washington found that five or more cups of Joe a day doubled visceral fat.) STEP 4: Use Tea to "Flavor" Your Water ANNUAL WEIGHT LOSS: 13½ pounds In one of the greatest feats of marketing ever, Vitaminwater produces products that sound a lot like health drinks but are nothing more than straight-up sugar. Its Power-C Dragonfruit flavored water has 120 calories and 31 grams of sugar--that''s the equivalent of drinking 13 Jolly Ranchers. You would lose more than a pound a month just by making this one swap each day. STEP 5: Choose Tea Over Juice ANNUAL WEIGHT LOSS: 14½ pounds What could be healthier than this: Langers Pomegranate Blueberry Plus. It''s 100 percent juice, says so right on the label.

But the "Plus" is juice concentrate, which is so sweet that Langers packs 30 grams of sugar in each 8 ounce glass: that''s the sugar equivalent of two--two!--Snicker''s Ice Cream Bars. STEP 6: Make Your Own Iced Tea ANNUAL WEIGHT LOSS: 13½ pounds If you''re a Snapple fan, you probably saw "Tea Cleanse" and thought, Great! But bottled teas aren''t necessarily the answer. First, once a tea is made and sits on a supermarket shelf for, oh, an entire NFL season, the nutrients have spent enough time exposed to light and air that they begin to break down. Plus, who knows what else has worked its way into that bottle? Snapple''s All Natural Green Tea packs 120 calories and 30 grams of sugar, while Ssips Green Tea with Honey & Ginseng is sweetened not so much with honey but with high fructose corn syrup." DON''T HIT THE BOTTLE A few years back, the authors of Eat This, Not That! commissioned ChromaDex laboratories to analyze 14 different bottled green teas for their levels of disease-fighting catechins. While Honest Tea Honey Green Tea topped the charts with an impressive 215 milligrams of total catechins, some products weren''t even in the game. For instance, Republic of Tea Pomegranate Green Tea had only 8 milligrams, and Ito En Teas'' Tea Lemongrass Green had just 28 milligrams, despite implying on its label that the product is packed with antioxidants. Why the discrepancy? The fact is, store-bought teas typically lose 20 percent of EGCG/catechin content during the bottling process, which is why brewing your own is so critical.

If you really want bottled tea then shoot for versions with an acid like lemon juice or citric acid, which help stabilize EGCG levels. Recent studies show that the more acidic the environment, the more stable the tea''s nutrients. But even in a highly acidic drink, more than half of the nutrients are gone within 3 months. I believe in The 7-Day Flat-Belly Tea Cleanse because I''ve seen the power of tea, and I''ve experienced it for myself. Tea saved my mother''s life, and has changed the lives of so many people I know. Tea has not only given me control over my body, my health, and my weight, but it has also given me something far more valuable: control over my mind, my stress, and my time. It was during a short time in Seoul, South Korea, while I was pursuing a media career, that my love affair with tea truly began. In Korea, tea is as common as bottled water in America.

Everywhere you look, vending machines are selling not cans of Coke but 60-cent cups of hot tea. And so, wanting to fit in, I too joined the tea culture. And that''s when everything changed. Tea will literally squelch your appetite and make staying slim utterly effortless. When you drink tea, you do more than nourish yourself. You join an international community of people around the world who are engaging in the very same rituals as you. Throughout Asia, tea is practically a national drink. In places like Morocco, you''ll never enter a home without being offered tea--it''s considered rude! From England to India, people plan their travel and work schedules around tea.

And tea is both a private and a social event. Nobody thinks of getting together for a soda; drinking alone isn''t a very good sign; and coffee is a great drink, but one that comes with its own jittery side effects. Tea stands alone as the ritual you can enjoy alone before bedtime, or with a close girlfriend catching up on the latest gossip. And that''s why only tea makes sense as the basis of a cleanse that you can revisit over and over again. You don''t have to order it from a fancy delivery service, spend oodles of your hard-earned dough on proprietary concoctions, or become a monk who can''t join in social events because there''s none of your magic elixir on hand. If you have a few dimes and access to hot water, you''ve got it made. I''ve already shared with you the power of this amazing brew. Now I want to share with you the principles of the Tea Cleanse, so you can begin experiencing its magic immediately.