You’re Not Just What You Eat… You’re Also What You Drink

Most people know they need to drink more water in the summer, but amazingly, they pull back in fall and winter. This could be wreaking havoc on their health.

Regardless of the season, you need to drink a minimum amount of water to sustain good, let alone great health.

The question of how much water to consume is one that is as confusing as what type of vitamins to take, what foods to eat for optimum health and how much sleep we need.

A general baseline recommendation is the 8 x 8 rule. Eight glasses of eight ounces of water per day. Again, this is a baseline. Most people actually need more.

You are What You Drink

You’ve likely heard, “You are what you eat.” Yet, we are also what we drink. The unhealthier your choices in the fluids you put into your body are, the unhealthier you will be. It’s simple mathematics.

Conversely, when you put clean water into your system, your body can cleanse itself, hydrate and increase your energy stores.

Most people could, if they had to, survive for several weeks without food, but not so with water. Our window of time to go without water is only a matter of hours. (I’m not suggesting you go without food)

With no water in hot conditions we become out of balance and fall into dehydration in about an hour. Within seventy-two hours, even in good conditions, we go into shock and fall into a comatose state.

Symptoms of Dehydration

Depending on the weather and your activity level, you absolutely must increase your water intake. You lose water through breathing, sweat, urine, and feces.

People even sweat when they’re in the water. Maybe you remember becoming thirsty while swimming, even though you were in the water. Failure to replenish your water stores can result in headaches, pain, dizziness, and flu-like symptoms. This is caused from dehydration and is easily cured by drinking a few glasses of water.

Mild dehydration can cause dizziness, headache, drowsiness, blurry sight, weakness, heart palpitations, muscle cramps, and many more symptoms. Chronic dehydration can lead to pain and eventually degenerative disease.

Maintain Hydration with Food

Water is a life-giving miracle. Water crosses our cell membranes freely, but we need to maintain good hydration to take care of our wonderful body parts.

Besides drinking water, another way to replenish water stores is in what you eat. Fruits and vegetables are loaded with water. A cucumber is almost 90 percent water – a fantastic source of water and a delicious hydrating snack.

You can carry a cucumber with you like a water bottle with edible packaging. Watermelon, berries, tomatoes, peppers, and apples are full of natural, nutrient packed water. Lettuce and greens are mostly water. Think of the weight of fruits and vegetables. That weight is from their water content.

Some Water Is NOT Healthy to Drink

Not all water is not created equal. Depending on where you live, your water may be extremely pure, or it could be incredibly contaminated from pollutants.

Pollutants have been found in waters thought to be untouched and pristine in the far reaches of the planet. Newspaper articles have circulated about the 60,000 different chemicals used in farming and industry that can get into our water supply. Water is treated with chemicals added for “safety,” such as fluoride to harden teeth.

Water filters are very popular today for this very reason. My family lives in an area that claims to have some of the purest water in the world. It comes from a deep well and tastes great. One day a patient came to the office for a treatment. He had been fixing a broken water pipe not far from our home. I commented on how great our water is and how lucky we are to not be on a big city water system.

He scoffed and said, “Are you kidding? You should see the slime in those pipes! I won’t drinkit!” We got a water filtration system right away!

There are many types of water filters available in a wide range of prices, from filtering pitchers to large systems that filter all the water in your house. You can use muscle-testing to determinewhether your tap water is healthy for you or you should use a filtration system.