Yeah, but what about those other affects?

One of the biggest reasons that I don’t enjoy drinking water is because I end up going to the bathroom more. I find that annoying. Of the many pleasant activities I can engage in during the day, that is not one of them.

I was greatly heartened to discover that this trait of water drinking is really only a problem at first. Now of course in the long run, you will end up going more often, but it isn’t nearly as bad as it seems it will be when you first increase your water consumption.

You see, all that time you’ve spent dehydrated, your body has been of the opinion that you are trying to live through a drought. It conjured up mental images of water rationing, and you being forced to drink strange bubbly things or black caffeine filled soup due to the tragic water shortage.

Understandably, being a diligent well-meaning body that really wanted to do it’s part, it tried to retain every last precious drop of moisture it could. Of course this presented a storage problem, but it solved that by cheerfully filling up you hands, your ankles, your tummy, and generally every other place it could find, with all it’s horded water. I’m sure you’re very grateful.

So anyway, when you start drinking water by the glassful, a little celebration with fireworks and party hats and confetti occurs inside you now that the drought has ended. Your body can finally relax and release all that stored water because it’s flowing freely again (no pun intended, seriously).

The more water you drink, the more of that retained water from those thick ankles and fat fingers will be released and excreted. Thusly, you will feel like you are running to the little girls’ room every stinking minute. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel moderately better about the whole process to know that the more times I use the restroom, the thinner my hands get.

Seriously though, if you have swollen ankles, hands, tummy, or whatever, the fastest way to get rid of that extra water (and much safer than diuretic pills or other “quick fixes”) is simply to drink and drink and drink some more.

Think of yourself as a sparkling clean pipe through which water flows. To date, you’ve been more of a bucket. Personally I like the pipe idea better. Buckets get yucked up after a while as that water sits there and stagnates.

But what I’m trying to say is that this is temporary and will get better soon. Once all that retained water is gone, what comes out is no more than what you put in, minus the water you lose through you skin and what you are breathing out (which is actually pretty substantial).

Drink like a fish and soon everything will even out and the downsides will disappear while the upsides of a slim body, clear healthy glowing skin, improved health, and increased energy will continue to increase.

Those scientists aren’t kidding when they say that water is life.

What the Most Beautiful People in the World do

When you read about the personal habits of models, people who make their entire living off being beautiful, one habit that they all have in common is that they are fanatical water drinkers. Over and over again you can find hydration listed as one of the non-negotiable set-in-stone laws to being beautiful and heaving healthy skin.

I think the reason that those famous beauties drink so much water is more than just for its weight reduction properties. These are women (and men) who can lose an important job if their skin isn’t spectacular. Also, they are intimately aware that if they don’t preserve that incredible skin, their careers will have the longevity of a shooting star.

What would you do if your entire income, your career future, and your fame hinged on maintaining beautiful skin and a beautiful body? Probably whatever it takes. These are folks with a lot to lose, so they are good teachers for how the rest of us humdrum folks can be beautiful too.

Now I’m not saying that models are the end-all and be-all of health habits, especially since they have to maintain a level of body fat that would make most doctors pale. But let’s do learn from models on the things that they do best: hair, makeup (they do their own), and exceptional skincare. Though if I ran into a model who had been working for more than ten years I’d take a pretty humble attitude towards her health tips too, because you can’t maintain a career in that field for the long-term if you have poor health habits.

Anyway, models and long term beauties swear by hydration as one of their most fundamental techniques for preserving the beauty of their skin.

The French have also long believed in the value of being well hydrated. Seeing as how the country has elevated skin care to an art form, I’m inclined to believe them.

According to Mireille Guiliano in French Women Don’t Get Fat, French children are raised to drink water constantly. Bottles are distributed each morning to each cubicle in the offices and is always on the table at meals. We of course see glasses of water at restaurants, but how many of us put a pitcher out on the table at breakfast, lunch, and dinner at home?

If you think that you have properly hydrated skin simply through moisturizing, you’ll be very disappointed over the next few decades. While moisturizers are an important part of skin care, we can’t absorb enough water through our skin to keep it properly hydrated. Hydration happens from the inside out.

Dehydrated skin looks old and saggy and wrinkled. If you want youthful healthy skin that glows with vitality, you absolute must hydrate it.

Water, the ultimate weight loss secret

After oxygen, water is pretty much the most vital thing you need in life. And most people don’t get enough of it. While the conventional recommendations say you should drink 64 ounces, I really believe that your water needs should be calculated based on your weight, the temperature, and your activity level.

The way I figure it, it seems that your base water consumption should be somewhere around 1 oz. for every 2 pounds of body weight. All you have to do take your weight and multiply it by .5 and you’ll know that base number.

If either it’s really hot, you exercise a lot, work hard physically, are trying to lose weight, or are pregnant (you have an increased blood capacity to support), I think you should be drinking closer to 2 oz for every three pounds of body weight. Multiply your weight by .66 to get the number of oz.

Now these are my recommendations based on things I’ve read, not because I’ve done a scientific study on it. If you have information that would help me revise my numbers, I’d be glad to see it as I believe that proper hydration is one of the biggest components of health and beauty. But I simply don’t accept that my mother-in-law who is 4’11” and probably 105 pounds soaking wet, aught to be drinking the same amount as me (I’m 5’ 7” and I won’t tell you what I weigh, but it’s more than 105).

Developing the water drinking habit is not easy for me as I don’t especially like the stuff. But as I mentioned in that other post, I see such an amazing change in the quality of my health when I’m fully hydrated, that it is worth the effort to continue working on this habit.

Water is a vital key to weight loss, and it’s not just because it fills your stomach so that you aren’t as hungry. Yes you will eat less, as thirst signals often feel like hunger and so by increasing your water intake, you will satisfy those without you taking in unnecessary calories. But there is more to its weight loss effects than that.

Your liver is what metabolizes fat. If your liver isn’t functioning efficiently, the excess fat has to be stored until it can get around to it (read: saddlebags, gut, big bottom, flabby arms that keep waving after you stop, etc).

Your kidneys are what filter out toxins, a process that is vital to keeping your body healthy. If you don’t drink enough water to keep your kidneys flushed out and filtering properly, your liver will set aside a lot of its fat metabolizing, so as to help the kidneys with their filtration. Toxins are poison, so it’s higher on your body’s priority list to get those filtered out and excreted than to process your fat. It’s in your best interest to get those kidneys doing their job by themselves so that your liver can get back to doing what is important to the size of your waistline.

What all that boils down to is that the less water you drink, the more your metabolism will be reduced because your body has more important things to do. If you want to get that metabolism ramped back up to where it’s supposed to be, you have to work with your body and give it all the flushing cleansing water it needs.

In addition, if your muscles are well hydrated, they will perform better, which translates into more calories burned 24 hours a day (again, higher metabolism).

And one more thing, if you are losing weight right now, then all the fat that is dissolving contains toxins that now your body must deal with.

Please please be kind to your body and flush those kidneys with plenty of clean water so that you can excrete all that junk out of your system.

Well I’ve probably saddled you with enough for one day.

Drink, drink, and drink some more. Work with your body and it will function beautifully the way that it was intended to. A vibrant healthy glowing body is an alluring body.

Don’t forget to keep working on all your steps in progress:

This step: Drink plenty of water (Health and Beauty)

Last step: Be emotionally independent (Living Well)

I'm back!

Hello everyone!

Well I’m finally back after being out of town to help my parents get their home ready for my little sister’s wedding. Everything turned out well, she was beautiful and radiantly happy, and now I’m finally ready to get back into gear and return to normal life.

I was looking at that last week’s posts and realized that they weren’t complete enough (due to wedding activities) to really do the topic or you, the reader, justice. So I would like to spend a few more days on the topic of water. It is so vitally critical to your beauty, and even more importantly to your health (Alluring Women are not sickly women), that I don’t want to skimp.

So let’s pick up where we left off and explore this step a little more.

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.

The elixir of life

What if there were a magic elixir that could make your skin beautiful and glowing, could clean your body of all the poisons and toxins it has built up, could take pounds off your body, could increase your health and vigor, could infuse you with new levels of energy, could prevent many illnesses and many of your headaches, and on top of everything else, was completely free. All you have to do is to drink it.

Take a minute and go drink a glass of water. Start the process of flushing your body with this miracle liquid and I’ll tell you more tomorrow.

* * *

This week’s topic: Water, the elixir of life (Health and Beauty)

And don’t forget to continue working on last week’s topic: Living emotionally independent (Living Well)

Feeling beautiful

Everybody wants to feel attractive. In our culture we learn to measure ourselves against a model of “perfection”, and any place where we don’t measure up is a “flaw” that we should either correct or spend our lives wishing we could. We have lost sight of the simple fact that there is no ideal body. Every body is unique and individual. As long as you are healthy and your body can meet all the demands you place on it, then it is exactly as it aught to be.

I find it fascinating that some of the more alluring women in history have not been “perfect”. Even the French, fabled paragons of beauty and allurement, tend to have roman noses and frankly, they aren’t that naturally beautiful. To me it shouts out the fact that a woman’s beauty is not in the shapes of her features or the size of her hips or whether or not her legs touch in the right places. A woman’s beauty is in the aura she projects.

As long as you hate your body for this or that “flaw”, you will need somebody else to provide you constant shots to your self esteem. You will always be dependant on an emotional “fix” to keep you going.

My oldest child has a birthmark across her forehead. When she was very little I used to make sure her bangs were arranged to hide that birthmark. I planned her haircuts around family photos so that the mark wouldn’t show in the photo if her trim was a bit too short. This went on for a couple years before I suddenly realized what I was doing! When it hit me, I just wanted bury my face and cry! I was programming this beautiful little child from her earliest memories to see herself as flawed! Can you imagine a worse legacy to give a child? She can’t change her birthmark, she didn’t commit some crime that put it there, so how is it a flaw?

So what if you have some mark on your face! So does Cindy Crawford. So what if your breasts are “too small” or “too large”. That’s not even physically possible since they were custom made for your body. Every part of you was custom made and individually tailored to match every other part of you.

Take time to really get to know your body and learn to love it. It’s the only one you are ever going to get, so relish it. When you love your own beautiful unique body for all its quirks (rather than despite them) you won’t need the compliments. You will act beautiful because you feel than way. The funny thing is that the less you need to be told you are beautiful, the more you will hear it.

Find your own beauty and then everybody else will discover it too.