It’s almost a matter of pride, isn’t it? From the heavy drinker to the tea drinker, from the coffee addict to the cola boy, ‘water’ is a dirty word.
Are humans really among those rare mammals that need very little water to survive? After all, unlike desert creatures, we don’t have a built-in water-conserving mechanism. If you’ve read the early Dune sci-fi books, you’ve seen what could be done to make us like this, the ‘still suit’, but it’s not real. No, we are not built for low water intake.
So why do so many of us think we can get by on a couple of pints of fluid a day, and even drink it with diuretics like the alcohol and caffeine in cola, tea, and coffee? I don’t think we think so. We only think about comfort. Going to urinate is an inconvenient waste of time, so it seems sensible to avoid drinking a lot of fluids. But there is a high price for saving those few minutes each day.
If you’re one of those low water drinkers, and there are so many, you’ll be amazed at how much more alert you become and how quickly that ‘sluggish’ feeling goes away when you start drinking properly. Doctors don’t insist on that for no reason!
Our Miracle Poison Eliminators
One of the fastest ways to attract serious body collapse is to stop the elimination of poisons. Our bodies are constantly producing waste. It is part of the state of being alive. The feces are the obvious ones; so is breathing (gives off carbon dioxide); and sweating is another, the elimination of salts and some other chemical products.
Urine is also an important waste disposal. It is the end product of a complex chain of processes, beginning with the removal of waste from every cell in our body. Just by living and doing their jobs, all of our cells take in nutrients and oxygen and remove waste like lactic acid directly through the cell wall. Our blood and lymphatic systems drain this for processing in the liver, and our kidneys remove waste from the liver, store it in the bladder, and periodically pump it out. Good, so far.
Water is vital for health
The thing is that all of these processes depend on an adequate supply of water to function. Dehydrated cells cannot properly excrete poisons. One result is muscle cramp. Another is a poor ability to think clearly, as your brain is not working properly. Why? Low water in our blood and lymphatic systems is very dangerous, and your body will draw this water from almost every other part of your body to maintain blood functions without which you will soon die, especially cleaning waste from every cell in your body . . And if, like most of us, you eat a high-salt diet, your body needs even more available water to maintain the hydration balance between your blood and cells. Or again, you die, painfully.
Concentrated urine is an early symptom of dehydration and can cause all kinds of malfunctions, including kidney and gallstones. Birds have a mechanism to suck almost all the water out of their urine, giving you the familiar white missile on the head! But we don’t have that ability. When our urine becomes too concentrated, it’s a sign of trouble.
A classic result of dehydration is those hallucinations (all those ‘lost in the desert’ stories) when your brain is deprived of water to keep the rest of you alive. Oh, and if you are dehydrated, you will also have digestive problems, mainly constipation.
But we don’t have to go too far down this road to be handicapped by dehydration. An early symptom is a loss of focus as the water is sucked out of our brains to keep everything else going. That can be expensive indeed. Migraine and headaches is another. So if you want to avoid the pain, or losing money through poor decisions or the risk of an accident, keep hydrating, drink up!
How much water should I drink?
It’s easy to do: follow the well-known doctor’s advice to drink seven glasses of water a day. You’ll find that you become more alert, feel more refreshed, and maybe those headaches and migraines you get under stress will magically disappear. And of course you will need to urinate more often, but that is natural and healthy!
Water can be any drink with water, other than a diuretic (see above). So soup, milk, fruit juice, herbal teas, etc. all count. Water in your meals doesn’t make it unless they’re very water-rich, and don’t forget to count the calories in these beverages as part of your meal. It’s not my fault if you get fat! And drink constantly throughout the day, not liters at a time!
Maybe you want a more specific guide? Here are three easy tips to help you drink the right amount of water:
TIP ONE: Calculating daily water needs
Calculate your optimal water intake using one of these rules of thumb – you only have to do it once.
- in pounds, drink half an ounce of water a day for every pound of your body weight. So if you weigh 150 pounds, drink 150/2 = 75 ounces of water a day. That’s just under 5 US pints, well under 4 Imperial pints.
- In pounds, drink 3/100 of your weight in water each day. So if you weigh 70 kilos, drink 70 x 3/100 = 210/100 = 2.1 liters (same as kilos) of water each day, just over 2 liters.
That may sound like a lot of water, but it isn’t! Most mammals have a similar water intake voluntarily. Only humans stubbornly resist drinking for short-term convenience and despite receiving those natural ‘thirst’ signals. You will see below how little each hour is.
TIP TWO: Spot Dehydration
First, look for a loss of concentration. If you forgot to drink in the last two hours, you have probably found the reason. But also keep a general watch on your urine concentration. Most people’s urine is a bright yellow color, and this is considered normal. But most people are dehydrated! A simple motto is PEE PALE. It is easy. Aside from maybe the first time you go in the day, or if you’re sick or eating something poisonous like whiskey and detoxifying fast, expect your urine to be a pale straw color. If it gets stronger, definitely a deeper yellow, drink up! It really is that simple. And yes, you may have to look inside the bowl to check. It’s not really that gross, is it? I bet if you’re a guy, you’ll find yourself looking over to the next stall in public restrooms, just to check what color… I bet!
TIP THREE: The Daily Balance
Your body is naturally good at maintaining water balance, if you’re not as dehydrated as many Westerners. If you are slightly dehydrated, your kidneys will allow less water to enter which contains a higher concentration of waste in your bladder; that’s where the brighter yellow urine comes from.
Suppose you don’t urinate, even when you get signals that your bladder is full and you need to (3-hour gripping movie? Watching a long race?) Or suppose you’re really dehydrated and out of water. Then your kidneys will stop processing the waste and the level of poison in your blood will start to rise. Many people are at that high poison level all the time, and concentration and bodily processes such as efficient digestion and removal of waste from cells begin to deteriorate.
If, on the other extreme, you have a lot of water in your blood, then your bladder fills up quickly. You should urinate more often and your urine will be very pale.
So, within certain limits, you can cope with a fairly wide difference in water intake with no problem. But if you hydrate too much or underhydrate, you will have pathological conditions.
It will work best if you have a regular intake of water, just the right amount every hour you are awake. So try to drink your optimal daily dose of water evenly throughout the waking day. (When you sleep, the system pretty much shuts down anyway. That’s why a tall glass of water is a good first action when you wake up.)
Let’s say you’re a 300 pound, 150 pound guy, and your optimum is about three liters a day. If you’re awake 16 hours a day, that’s about 200 ml (about 7 ounces) every hour, and one hour you eat a meal that’s mostly water, for example fruit or soup. If you are a thin woman and need two liters a day, make it about 150 ml per hour (about 5 ounces). Now, even if you’re one of the dehydrated majority, that doesn’t seem like an impossible amount to drink, does it?
If you find you’ve become dehydrated or realize you’ve forgotten to drink for several hours, drink an hour’s supply right away, then another in 20 minutes to a half hour. That gets you back on track and your body will rebalance itself pretty quickly. What you should not do is try to recover all the lost fluid. You’ve already adjusted to its loss, and drinking that much at once will overhydrate you.
Be sensible about managing your water balance
These are pretty rough figures in Tips 1 and 3, so don’t get too rigid about it. (You may have noticed that the conversions for pounds and kilograms are not exactly the same, but they are easy to calculate.) If you drink twice the amount shown, you are overexerting your kidneys, which is not good. If you drink half, you’re pretty dehydrated. Be sensitive about it.
If you’re taking diuretics, you’re forcing your kidneys to process more water than they should, so you’ll urinate too often. The result is that you have to drink more to stay hydrated. The most common diuretic drinks contain stimulants like caffeine and taurine, or alcohol, or maybe both! Therefore, anything that is strongly alcoholic, especially broths, liqueurs, and wine, will need water to balance it out. So will tea, coffee, chocolate, colas, and sports/energy drinks (Red Bull, for example), and the stronger they are, the more water you’ll need to balance them out. They all contain poisons and will cause a detox effect anyway, so it’s not easy to judge the correct balance. Weak tea or coffee, or most colas, won’t need much water to balance. Strong things like extra-strength tea, coffee shorts, and sports drinks with taurine may need more water than the drink itself to balance. Italians don’t drink water with their coffee for nothing!
One last point: if you’re sweating freely, the rules are different. I think of extreme conditions, like being in a humid environment with blood temperature or working hard in a very hot environment, or working very hard anywhere. Some examples are: long-distance runners, cyclists, and swimmers; underground coal miners; ovens; shot blasters with complete remote air equipment, sugar cane cutters. Under these conditions, you can quickly excrete more water than your body can afford to lose. You can also lose too much salt, one of the few situations where you can be salt deficient. The answer, just as intense sweating occurs, is to drink extra water to make up for sweat losses, with a pinch of salt added to each liter. No need for expensive specialty drinks: If you need sugar to top up your blood sugar, use honey or a low-acid fruit juice (eg melon) in your water. There’s no stimulant poison in homebrew and you know what you’re getting!
In general, your attitude toward hydration should be simple: Be sensible. Tip 2 is your guide to common sense: pee pale!
Happy drinking!