Are you drinking more then 6 glasses of water a day even when you not thirsty? Stop!
Are you one of those who carry a bottle around and force every sip into you just to fulfill "recommendations"? Do you drink even if you are not thirsty? Do you think that thirst means you are already dehydrated?
Let me share with you what I’ve learned from Cathy Gulli’s article "Enough with drinking water" in Lifestyle.
Susan Barr, the professor of nutrition at the University of British Columbia has very strong opinion that it is a myth that in order to hydrate ourselves we need to drink plain water. All kinds of fluids count - juice, pop, beer, coffee, tea, soup. The water is also in chicken, other meat, bread, and fruits.
We should stop choking down eight glasses of water as we are told to and start to take a much more individualized approach to hydration. We are not the same, how much water we need depends on our diet, level of activities, how hot our environment is, our size and our health issue, not to mention personal preferences.
Listen to your body, people! Our body is telling us what it needs, we just stopped to listen. Very first, clear signal that we need to drink is thirst. If we are thirsty sip of water or other liquids feels simply very good. If you forcing water into you and it doesn’t taste good - just stop drinking and don’t feel guilty about it. Remember - you don’t need to drink that much.
To make sure that your hydration is correct you can also watch your urine colour - it should be “moderate” yellow, almost like lemonade. The best is to look at it in the morning, just make sure that you did not take your evening multivitamins, as they might affect the colour.
If your urine is colourless — you are drinking more water than you need.
In that case, I assume, you also need to go to the bathroom few times at night. Wouldn’t that be nice to sleep through the night without those bathroom trips? Well, stop drinking that much!
Remember that when urinating very often you flashing all necessary minerals ( which you probably supplemented few hours ago with pills) into the toilet . So, that how part of your money goes to the drain!
There is another myth about how drinking a lot of water is going to hydrate your skin - skin is the largest organ in our body and the last one where the water eventually will get - or rather not, as before it gets to the skin it will be eliminated via your bladder to the loo. So, not so much for the skin left - good moisturizer creme will do the trick and take care of your skin needs for hydration.
I found it also very interesting what Heinz Valtin, professor emeritus of physiology at the Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover N.H said about carrying a water becoming a “security blanket”.
As adults we became obsessed with good hydration, started to believe every written word without questioning what we read, we forgot how to listen to our body.
Maybe it is time to question what we are told.