The nuts and bolts of it

Do you have a hard time drinking enough water?

I do.

I was going to do a different topic for this first week in the Health and Beauty subject, but this is perhaps my greatest Health and Beauty challenge. I didn’t grow up drinking water (my mother always drank lots of it, but the habit never got passed down to us kids) and I’ve spent years and years now trying to rationalize consuming other beverages instead. I’ve also spent years fighting strange symptoms that I never connected with dehydration. I tend to get dizzy when I stand up too fast, I have no energy at all on hot days, and I get headaches. While these things can be caused by reasons other than dehydration, I’ve found that when I actually stick to drinking my required ounces each day, these symptoms vanish like magic. Not only that, but my body improves in ways I hadn’t even noticed as problems.

Believe it or not, my metabolism speeds up! In fact when I was a teenager and trying desperately (and in many stupid ways) to lose weight, I noticed that if I drank a glass of water, I got hungry very quickly. This really upset me because I was trying to fill my belly with of water to make myself feel full, but I always seemed to eat more when I’d been drinking plenty of water.

In one of those classic I-can’t-believe-I-was-that-stupid moments, I decided that drinking water was hurting the weight loss cause and tried to avoid drinking, as much as possible! It wasn’t until later that I finally realized that water is vitally important in the metabolic process and that my constant dehydration was slowing my metabolism down! Talk about shooting oneself in the foot!

So how much water do you need? Well conventional advice says a minimum of 64 ounces for an average adult (How many of us are the statistical “average adult”?) in conditions not overly dry, hot, or who isn’t engaging in much physical exertion.

Um, yeah. As if that describes my daily life.

I’ve noticed that bodybuilders (who are utterly obsessed with health and tend to be more reliable since they judge results based on physical performance and not on what most effectively sells something) recommend a lot more water than the government health recommendations.

Since you generally aught to work your water intake upwards rather than drowning your poor unsuspecting body, I’d say work towards 64 ounces and then experiment with higher levels and see if your body responds positively.

So how do you manage this impossibly large sounding number of ounces?

Start by picking out a drinking glass that you can comfortably finish in one sitting (I use a 14 ounce glass which is a good bit larger than the recommended 8 ounces, but that is comfortable for me). Then do the math to find out how many of these glasses you need to make up your ounces (when in doubt, round up a glass not down).

Now here comes the easier part.

Drink one glass when you first wake up in the morning (yes, before your coffee) and another last thing before you go to bed. Then all you have to do is make up the glasses in between. I find that I need to drink five glasses a day, so once my morning and nighttime glasses are out of the way, I only need to remember to drink three glasses over the course of the day.

Another useful technique is to have a little pad next to the place where you keep your glass (if you are at home, next to the kitchen sink is ideal). Write a tick mark for each glass you drink and then you can see at a glance how much you need to go. I promise that it’s easier than it sounds.

You should start noticing the benefits of increased hydration within 48 hours (I’m not sarcasticly referring to increased bathroom trips), but the benefits will continue to show up for weeks as it can take that long to become truly hydrated. Just think of taking an old dry sponge and immersing it. It takes a while before it can actually absorb that liquid.

Please don’t put this off until tomorrow, next week, or next month. Start now. Don’t wait until you can start this habit perfectly. Even a glass of two a day is better than nothing.

As Flylady would say: Even drinking water imperfectly still blesses your body.