Water, Water Everywhere!
We’ve all come across those irritating health nuts who tote their water bottles with them everywhere they go. We also have friends who live at the other end of the spectrum, bragging that their only liquid intake comes out of coffee cups or aluminum cans.
Which one of them is right? Is it true that drinking water plays a major role in getting and staying healthy? Why would water be so important? And just exactly how much is enough? And come to think of it, if you didn’t drink enough water – making you dehydrated – could that make you fat? Let’s learn more about water and why it would be nutty to keep your water bottle at home.
First let’s go over the numbers. Our bodies are about two-thirds water. Even more staggering is the fact that our brains are 95 % water. The blood that runs through our veins is right around 82%.
So it should come as no surprise that our bodies need water so much that it only takes about a 2% drop below normal for the signs of dehydration to kick in. Most people think of signs of dehydration as just feeling thirsty. They couldn’t be more wrong. When our bodies are dehydrated, we have problems with short-term memory; we experience difficulty reading small print and we feel tired and ready for a snooze most of the time.
Water does amazing things for the body. Most people know that it’s the main ingredient in saliva, which means that it helps us talk, chew food and swallow. We can also figure out that it cools us by making it possible for us to sweat when we’re too hot.
What you may not know is that water can help you get into your skinny jeans. It’s obvious that if you pick water over a can of cola, you’re not going to consume all those empty calories. But the big boost water gives us is that it also regulates our metabolism, which is the rate that we burn all those calories. To understand how that works we need to talk about the liver and the kidneys.
The liver is the hero when it comes to burning fat and creating energy. But the liver also serves the kidneys. The kidneys’ job is to clean the blood, but if we are dehydrated the kidneys won’t work properly. Since cleaning the blood is a life-and-death function, as soon as the kidneys fail to deliver, the liver steps in and picks up the slack. While it’s doing the kidneys’ job it can’t process fat, giving “stubborn fat” a whole new meaning.
Lots of people ask if it’s okay to drink other fluids because they have water in them. The answer is simple: Do these other fluids contain sugars that the body will have to digest or do they contain helpful ingredients that boost your body’s electrolytes?
To get healthy and stay healthy, the question isn’t “Should I drink plain water?” What you need to be asking is “How much should I drink?”
The trick is that there’s no right answer for everyone because we all come in different shapes and sizes and we all sweat for different reasons throughout the day. I go by the color of your urine. If your body is properly hydrated your urine should be somewhere in the range between colorless and the color of straw. If your urine is any darker, you’ve got some serious H2O drinking to do. Start with 4-6 glasses and work up to 8-10 on a daily basis.
Show your body some love and drink a toast (with water!) to your health.