If someone says, "You're all wet," it generally means you're definitely misguided, possibly entirely mistaken about some matter.

Unless the matter is your diet.Then the saying could be a compliment and mean that you're consuming many foods with a high-water content. Such foods tend to be high in volume but low in calories, so you feel filled up on fewer calories. That happens because the weight of "all wet" foods is far greater than those fried, baked, sweet, or fatty.So now's the time to "come in out of the rain" and embrace the weight-loss theory dubbed Volumetrics. The theory is strongly espoused by Barbara Rolls, Ph.D., chair of Nutritional Sciences at Penn State University, and author over 250 scientific articles and six books, including three specifically about Volumetrics: The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan: Feel Full on Fewer Calories (HarperCollins Publishers, 2000); The Volumetrics Eating Plan (HarperTorch Publishers, 2003); and The Ultimate Volumetrics Diet (HarperCollins Publishers, 2005).Volumetrics is far from a dictatorial diet. You do not need to follow it precisely, for instance, to benefit.Furthermore, there aren't any forbidden foods. As long as you replace some of the fried, baked, sweet, and fatty foods you used to eat with reasonable portions of "all wet" foods, you safely lose some weight while also improving your health.Simple math explains how Volumetrics weight loss works.A medium-sized, three-inch-diameter apple weighs 182 grams, 156 grams of which are water. Such an apple also contains 95 calories and 4.4 grams of fiber.If for some reason you decide to eat three for a snack, finishing the third might be a chore. Ingesting that much water and fiber in a single snack could make it so.Yet three medium apples only contain 285 calories despite weighing 546 grams, a weight that - are you ready for this? - is 1.2 times that of a 13.5-ounce bag of plain potato chips.Eat 13.5 ounces of chips and you consume 2025 calories, about 7 times the amount found in the aforementioned apples.The calorie count can also be substantial for seemingly healthy foods that are not "all wet." Eat the weight of three medium-sized apples in the form of dehydrated apple slices, and you get 1875 calories.And don't be surprised if you feel as hungry 90 minutes after eating that many calories of dehydrated apple. This so-called hunger rebound occurs after an excessive secretion of insulin removes too much of the excessive amount of sugar in your bloodstream, something that doesn't occur if you eat one, two, or even three medium-sized apples.Although Rolls hasn't published a book on Volumetrics in a while, recent research gives credence to her way of weight control.Last summer, a study published in the July-August issue of the Annals of Family Medicine based on research involving almost 10,000 American adults determined a correlation between carrying too much body weight and ingesting too little water. To establish this, the researchers used urine samples taken for the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2009-2012.Urine samples accurately determine hydration levels because they assess all water ingested, whether it be through water, other beverages, or water-filled foods, like fruits and vegetables.Study leader Dr. Tammy Chang, an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, and her associates found inadequate hydration increased the odds of obesity by 50 percent.Similarly, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys from 2005-2008 and 2009-2012 to substantiate a bevy of benefits from drinking more water. The results, published in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics about this time last year, found people who drank one to three cups more water than the daily average not only consumed fewer empty calories (such as those in sugar-sweetened beverages and junk food possessing no nutritional value) but also less total fat, sugar, sodium, and cholesterol.Additionally, those whose daily water consumption came in at three cups over the average ate, on the average, 204 fewer calories per day.In short, I'm sure that the concept of Volumetrics will stand the test of time. So if you'd like to keep your weight under control without really feeling as if you're starving yourself or following a diet, consider increasing the water content of your meals.And consider this.In a study Rolls did about 15 years ago, volunteers were told to eat their fill at a buffet on two different days. On both days the three entrees available looked the same, but on the second day they were prepared to have fewer calories by increasing the water content.The volunteers ate 20 percent fewer calories on average on that second day - yet claimed to be just as full and as satisfied as they were after the first meal.