Although most people don’t think of it as a nutrient, water is the most vital nutrient in your daily diet. Think of it this way. You can go weeks without food, but only days without water. So it’s very important. It’s even more important when you realize that your body composition is 60-75% water. So about two thirds of our body weight is water. You can break them down even better by looking at the composition of the different parts of the body. Your blood is 83% water; your muscles are about 75% water; your bones are about 23% water; and your brain is 74% water.
You can see why it is really necessary to drink enough water. It doesn’t take a lot of dehydration to cause problems in your body. You may have as little as 1-2% loss of body weight in water and the reaction may be that your energy is depleted and you feel tired.
Not getting enough water can cause other problems, including mild to excessive thirst, fatigue (which we just covered), headaches, dry mouth, muscle weakness, dizziness, lightheadedness, and little or no urination. Therefore, it is important to ensure that you drink enough water. Many people have asked “How much water is enough water?” The basic rule of thumb is to take about half your body weight converted into fluid ounces. So if a person weighs 200 pounds, he should drink 100 fluid ounces of water per day.
About 20% of your daily water intake can come from food. If you eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, there will be a lot of water in them. This is particularly true of things like watermelon and citrus that are almost 100% water when calculated by weight. Drinks like milk and juices are also mostly water.
Many people ask me “What about beer, wine, coffee, tea and soft drinks? Can these drinks be calculated in water consumption?” Unfortunately, these drinks are all diuretics and will actually filter the water out of your system. So water is still your best bet.
Now that I’ve mentioned some of the cons of not drinking enough water, here are some of the benefits. Water works on all systems of the body.
Help your digestion; helps you absorb all your food; It acts as the transport system for all nutrients in the bloodstream. Water is necessary for all functions, particularly circulation and excretion. For example, you expel water from your breath every time you exhale. Water leaves your system not only through urine, but also through feces, sweat, and breathing. You lose water on a daily basis, so it is extremely important to keep putting the water back on.
Water helps you maintain your body temperature; it does this through the process of sweating and by opening the capillaries in the circulatory system allowing the surface of the skin to have adequate blood flow that helps regulate body temperature. One of the most important things that water does is cleansing. Water helps flush toxins out of your system. Helps keep kidneys healthy; helps keep the bladder healthy; It gives you better skin because it helps remove debris, including dead skin cells.
Drinking enough water reduces the chance of kidney stones or urinary tract infections. It can give you more energy because dehydration is one of the biggest causes of fatigue. Not drinking enough water reduces blood volume, which makes your heart work harder and you get more tired, faster.
Another thing that water does is speed up your metabolism. There was a study recently published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism from a research center in Berlin. It showed that people who consume two liters of water a day can burn up to 150 additional calories per day. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but that turns out to be about 5 pounds. per year of weight loss you don’t even have to worry about because you’re burning off just by drinking more water.
It was also discovered during the study that when a person drank water, their metabolic rate increased by 10 minutes. The researchers believe that about 40% of the elevated metabolic rate was due to the fact that the body was heating the water that the person had drunk. That is a good reason to drink cold water. Another good reason to drink cold water is that it enters your system more quickly than warm water.
Water also helps suppress your appetite. Helps you feel fuller while helping the body metabolize stored fat. According to studies, if you decrease your water intake, it can actually cause more fat to be deposited. Likewise, if you increase your water intake, you will decrease existing fat deposits.
This is why it works that way. Your kidneys cannot function properly if you do not supply water to the body. When the kidneys are not working properly, part of the load normally carried by the kidneys is transferred to the liver.
The most important function of the liver is to metabolize stored fat and convert that stored fat into usable energy for your body. If the liver has to do some of the work of the kidneys, it obviously won’t be able to function at full capacity. What ends up happening? The liver can’t metabolize as much fat, so you end up storing more fat in your body. Because water is so vital to metabolizing fat, it’s a key factor in losing weight. Weight loss is increased by the increased metabolism provided by drinking enough water. With this in mind, an overweight person actually needs to drink more water than a thin person. That’s because the more you weigh, the higher your metabolic load.
Since we know that water helps metabolize fat and that an overweight person metabolizes more fat, it is easy to see that the overweight person needs to drink more water. In fact, they should drink an extra glass of water for every 25 lbs. of extra weight they are carrying.
Water also helps maintain muscle tone. Since muscles are over 75% water, it helps give them the ability to contract, prevents dehydration within the muscles, and prevents pain.
It also helps prevent sagging skin. This happens because as the water flushes out the toxins, the shrinking cells are actually powered by the water, giving them a clean and healthy cell structure. It does this by removing all toxins from the cells.
Water is a universal solvent; Water is a cleaner that we use all the time to wash our dishes, clean our clothes, and clean our cars. It makes sense that we should also use it to cleanse our bodies.
During weight loss, if you’re working on it, your body will dump a lot of toxic waste into your system as it burns stored fat. You will need to drink more water to help flush out all those toxins and keep you from feeling uncomfortable from the detox. So, the water helps get rid of waste and removes it quickly.
Speaking of getting rid of waste, water also helps relieve constipation. When the body doesn’t get enough water, the first place it goes is the lower intestines. What happens then is that you become constipated due to lack of water. If the same person drinks enough water, the bowel movements come back. Since we’re talking about excretions and waste elimination, a good way to tell if you’re drinking enough water is the color of your urine. If it’s a dark orange or apple juice color, you’re not drinking enough water. The color of your urine should be more like lemonade. If your urine is crystal clear, that’s even better. That way you’ll know you’re fully hydrated.
When you finally get to the point where you are fully hydrated, all of your systems will work better. There will be no fluid retention because your body only retains fluid when it thinks it is running low on fluid. So when you get enough water, the fluid retention will stop, your stored fat cells will be used for fuel, the liver will be freed up to do the job it’s supposed to do, there won’t be as much stress. in your kidneys, your normal thirst will return and you won’t be as hungry.
Some people have asked about other sources of water besides fruits and vegetables. Tap water is not that good to drink. A study conducted by Tufts University on tap water in different parts of the United States showed contamination ranging from E. coli to pharmacy drugs. That’s not unusual when you think that about 80% of all medications people take are eliminated in the urine or feces. Currently, there are no wastewater treatment facilities that have pharmaceutical filters to filter and clean the water before returning it to the community for use. The highest concentration of a drug was found to be cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Lipitor. The second highest concentration was hormone replacement drugs like Premarin and birth control pills. So all of these things can be found in tap water.
It is best to get your own filters for your home. There are several different types of water filters available, including reverse osmosis and carbon filtration.
Bottled water is another way to do it. Try to stay away from plastic bottles because plastic can leach into your water over time. Bottled waters will have an expiration date. This is done to reduce the risk of plastic in the water if it was stored for a long period of time or in a heated environment. Plastic contains neurotoxins that can attack the nervous system and the reproductive system. Try to get your water by glass if possible.
Alkaline water is best for you. It is important for the body to stay at a more alkaline pH because studies have shown that the more acidic a body is, the more prone it is to disease, especially cancer. Try to keep your body’s pH at 7. This can be measured in your urine; it should also have a pH of 7 which will be that very light color I talked about earlier. By the way, the pH of water is 7. Most people in the United States have acidic bodies caused directly by their high meat consumption and generally poor diets that contain foods that will cause the body to become acidic. For example, soft drinks contain phosphoric acid which will make the body acidic.
In short, drink a lot of water and try to get it in a glass container.
