Are You Drinking Water Right?
If you are having skin problems, acidity, digestion problems, frequent headaches or feeling lazy, I have two good news for you. Firstly, you are not the only one, there are millions of people who face similar issues. Now this brings us to the second good news, since there are a lot of people going through these problems in their day-to-day life, a lot of studies have been done on these topics. Based on the studies, it’s been found that for most of the disease’s humans come across, the root cause is associated to be with water. Yes! Water.
Water happens to be the most abundant resource available, in almost 95% part of the worlds. When astronauts first looked back at our earth, they referred it as a blue marble. This blueness comes from the reflection of water present on earth. Despite this fact we have only 4% of freshwater resource on our planet. That means out of 71% of water on earth, only 4% percentage can be considered as drinking water. Now, surprisingly out of that 4% only 1.6 % is available to us. With global warming, melting our glaciers we can find more drinking water, but that’s not good either right? Melting of water from these glaciers will occupy our coasts and that water will not be even readily available as it would be salty. But that’s another topic for another day.
Coming back to our topic for the day, almost 90% of us drink water wrong. You might be wondering how such a basic act can go wrong. Water is an essential part of existence, and our body constitutes of 70% it. The problems mentioned earlier, are faced by millions of people resulting in medium to serious health issues, in worst cases even death.
Does this resonate – you are sitting at your desk occupied by work and so busy that you forgot to drink water. Probably, once you finished your tasks a few hours later, you realize you haven’t had a sip of water all along. Your eyes might be burning, jaw tightly clinched closing your mouth, you are breathing heavy through your nose like a dragon, your throat is dry, body temperature high than usual, a slight headache, with a numbing pain in the bum? Now numbness on your bum is directly a result of you sitting a bit too long on that comfortable throne, but other symptoms are your body’s way of telling you that it has depleted the internal source of fluid and now your cells are nearing a state exhaustion. What would you do, gulp a bottle of water thinking it will replenish your body and quench your thirst? In medical terms this is called as water intoxication or water poisoning.
Every individual has a specific capacity of holding water in one’s body. Drinking a lot of water in one go will cause a surge in water percentage in blood. Due to this excess water the electrolytes present in our body – mainly the sodium, starts getting dissolved. Water starts getting into our cells and as a result our body starts showing signs of inflammation. Now, when this starts happening with our brain cells, our body starts repelling and shows symptoms like headache, tiredness etc. Doctors call this as Hyponatremia.
How Can I know if my body has enough water?
An easiest and most effective way of knowing if you are depleting your body of water is by checking the colour of you pee. The colour of urine can tell you if your body has required level of water present or not. If you peed less and your urine colour is dark yellow, this indicates that the water level in your body is way lower than what it requires. Even if it is dark yellow, your body’s telling you to get hydrated and sends warning signs. Now if your urine colour is clear, it indicates that your body has higher water content in the body. Having both low or high water content is not good for our body. As like everything, it is important that we strike a balance. The correct volume of water in the body is depicted by light yellow colour urine. Checking the colour of urine is a very good indicator to analyse the water level in your body.
The To-Do’s
Here, we have listed your go to playbook to understand the right way of drinking water.
1. Always drink slowly.
If you tend to drink water while walking or raise your mouth and “gulp down” water from a bottle, lot of air also enters your body along with water. This can be a cause for acidity in your stomach. At a time, you should not drink more than 300 ml of water. Also, you should sit somewhere peacefully, and take small sip water from a glass. When you drink slowly it gives time to the enzymes in your mouth to latch on to water and reach down your gut. This is proven to be very helpful in assisting your digestion process.
2. Avoid drinking water while Eating
If you tend to drink water while walking or raise your mouth and “gulp down” water from a bottle, lot of air also enters your body along with water. This can be a cause for acidity in your stomach. At a time, you should not drink more than 300 ml of water. Also, you should sit somewhere peacefully, and take small sip water from a glass. When you drink slowly it gives time to the enzymes in your mouth to latch on to water and reach down your gut. This is proven to be very helpful in assisting your digestion process.
3. When & How much water to drink?
As you know by now, that our body constitutes of 75% of water. During a normal day about 2 – 2.5 litres of water gets excreted out of our body in form of pee, sweat and even breath. It is very important to replenish the same amount of water back. Daily, we should drink minimum of 2-2.5 litres of water.
While you are asleep our body is not fueled with water, and that’s on an average about 7-8 hour period. The first thing in the morning that one should practice is to drink water. From a glass drink about 300ml of water, even before brusing. As per ayurveda the enzymes in our mouth are considered, even more valuable than gold. These enzymes are very useful for our body and health. For most of us as soon as we get up, the first thing we do is brushing our teeth. Well brushing is a good habit before and after bedtime, but if you drink water before brushing you supply those enzymes to your body, and they will thank you with a healthy gut.
Drink 300ml of water as soon as you get up, do your routine, and have your breakfast after 30 min, followed by another 300ml of water after 30 mins of breakfast. Follow this same pattern throughout your other course of meals. For the freaks who are calculating, just by doing these simple changes in your daily routing, you are now drinking 1800ml of water per day.
4. Follow a drinking routine – (Water of course! 😊)
Now a days, in this digital world, there are a lot of application available in IOS and android stores that can remind, by setting off an alarm or sending notification to your smart watches or phones. So why not use the technology to our benefit. If you are one of those who get too engrossed in the work that you forget to drink water, you can have an app in your phone that will remind you to drink water just like mom’s used to when we were small kid’s. This is an effective way to remind ourselves that our body needs our attention too. Afterall, all the wealth in the world is no good if there is no health.
The Dont’s
Now that we know what To-Do, here are some of the things that you should consider not doing when it comes to drinking water
1. No Water after pee!
As you now know that we should refrain from drinking water just after or during a meal. Similarly, just right after peeing we should not drink water. After our episode in the lavatory, the muscles in our body are in a very relaxed state and if we drink water right after it, that water will most likely excrete through urine again. The cells in our body does not get a chance to absorb that water. So, drinking water right after you pee, it will only cause you to pee again soon.
2. No Water before Bedtime!
Drinking water right before you go to bed is not good. If you do this, you will often find yourself waking up in the middle of the night to take a leak or wake up in the morning with a swollen bladder. This can cause issues with your sleep cycles and can have adverse effects on your health due to not having good sleep quality. If you want to learn more about what can happen due to sleep deprivation check out this link. So, drink water at-least 30-45 mins before you sleep and avoid drinking water just before you sleep.
3. No Water During Workout!
Never drink water immediately after or during an intense exercise. When we do workout, our body loses a lot of electrolytes through sweat. Now, you might think you are replenishing the body with lost water, but in fact drinking a lot of water right after workout will dilute the remaining electrolyte in your body much faster. Drink water just to wet your throat. If you drink too much water after a strenuous and sweaty activity, one might feel tiredness, fatigue or feeling of vomiting. Instead of drinking plain water try having some electrolyte solutions, so that it replenishes and hydrates your body faster.
4. No Ice Water!
If you are one of those who, attack the freezer right after coming back home on a hot day, you will probably have frequent episodes of cold or digestion problem. Our body has apt temperature which it strives to maintain. If we drink cold/chilled water our body must recalculate and adjust accordingly. This reconfiguration can cause disbalance in blood pressure. We should always drink water that is in normal room temperature. Drinking cold water can give us a temporary sense of relaxation and a sensation of chillness but our body hates it. As per studies, we should always drink water that is either more or less than 4 degrees, than our body temperature.
With this we come to end of this post, hope this was informative and help you to lead a healthy life. To learn more about health, food and life tips – read our other interesting posts.
Closing off with an old saying!!
Drink right amount of water and your skin, your hair, your mind, and your body will thank you!
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