Are You Drinking Enough Water? | Day 4: Improving Your Life in 31 Days

This is the fourth post in the “Improving Your Life in 31 Days” series. For more information, and to view an index of all the posts in this series, please click here to go to the central page.

Despite any presumptions you’ve made about this post due to the somewhat vague title, you can rest assured that the only kind of drinking I’m going to be talking about today is: your water intake.

Quick Fact: Your body is made of up anywhere from 65-70% water.

Needless to say, water seems to be some pretty important stuff. So today as a part of the “Improving Your Life in 31 Days” series I’m going to have you do something you’ve probably been told to do all your life: drink enough water!

Benefits and Other Facts

So does this little bit of advice seem a little too trivial, or insignificant to you? Well, for the sake of this series, please bare with me. Before I get into some of the main benefits of staying hydrated, here are a couple facts to chew on:

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know about all the content regarding mind development, becoming smarter, etc. Well, for your information, your brain consists of a whopping 90% water (!!).
Your muscles consist of 75% water, and your blood 83% … sounds like a lot to me.

I assure you that drinking enough water throughout the day can impact you in more ways than you may know. Below are just some of the many benefits of having enough water in your system (which consists of nothing more than keeping up with good water drinking habits for about a day and a half, or two… and then continuing of course):

It can relieve headaches naturally.
Water hydrates your skin, making it look younger.
Improves your overall energy and reduces fatigue.
Helps keep you more healthy, especially your digestive system.
Because it helps your digestive system, being well-hydrated can reduce the risks of colon and bladder cancer.
Helps to improve your overall mood AND motivation levels.
Regulates your body temperature thus making exercise easier.
Improves your productivity with your work or personal ventures.
Reduces the risk of kidney stones, heart attacks, and improves your overall immune system—thus allowing your body to better fight off viruses such as the cold, flu, and other illnesses.
Concentrate and stay focused easier.
Experience less cramps and reduce the risk of sprains.
Much, much more…

Seriously, with a list of benefits that large (and even larger actually), you’d think I was introducing a miracle drug to you… but I’m not. It’s just water and all you have to do is just drink enough of it! And the best part is, I’m guessing that water is readily available to you (the entire surface of the Earth is made up of over 70% of it!).

Some Tips to Get You Started

So if drinking water is so easy and simple, then why are most people dehydrated? Well besides the fact that sodas, energy drinks, and coffee (my personal weakness), are becoming society’s replacements for water… a lot of times we simply “forget” to drink enough water throughout the day. When your focus and concentration is on your busy life, it’s very easy to forget to drink water… especially if your body is currently used to not getting enough already.

You may think, well if your body is used to it, then you must not need as much water as everyone else right? Wrong. You need just as much water as everyone else does, because your body works in the exact same way.

When not drinking enough water becomes a regular thing to your body, you are what’s known as chronically dehydrated… and that’s pretty dangerous because unless you’re body is extremely starved of water, you’ll feel pretty much normal—or whatever feels “normal” to you anyway. Once you’re hydrated, however, you’ll still see a big contrast.

Below are some tips for how to stay hydrated, and how to help yourself remember to drink enough water:

Don’t focus on 8 cups a day like everyone else tells you to. While that’s good, it may not be the right amount for you. Divide your body weight into 2/3rds (multiply by 0.6) and that is how many ounces of water YOU personally need to be drinking everyday. Add 12oz for every 30 minutes of physical exercise or labor—that’s your minimum intake for that day.
Once you know how many ounces you need each day, get a water bottle and find out how many ounces of fluid it holds. From there, figure out how many of those bottles you should drink per day.
Keep re-filling the water bottle(s) throughout the day and be sure to keep track of how many times you do so. It’s best if you try not to re-fill the bottle until it’s empty.
You need to be taking in water as equally spread out throughout the day as possible. I recommend drinking about a half of a cup (4oz—a very small amount) every hour and that should help you get all your water in by the end of the day.
It helps if you carry your water bottle around with you wherever you go. As human beings we are creatures of habit, so make it a habit to sip on your water bottle.
Eat plenty of fruit throughout the day because they contain lots of water, and while you won’t be able to judge how much water you’re getting from them, a little extra besides what you’re supposed to get is still okay.
Important: Make sure that you’re eating and not starving yourself of food, as you need the minerals to serve as electrolytes to keep you hydrated (this isn’t usually a big concern because it’s so easy to maintain).

So how exactly does drinking enough water improve your life? Well if the benefits didn’t speak for themselves, being healthy is a huge determining factor when it comes to the overall experience you get out of life, and in case you didn’t notice, water plays a HUGE role when it comes to your overall health (both mentally and physically).

You can have the fastest, most expensive car, but it’s not going anywhere until you put fuel in it!

To read more about how your overall health and well-being can affect your life, read the post I made when I had some kind of a flu earlier this year.

Another Huge Benefit of Getting Enough Water

For those of you interested in weight loss and maintaining your body weight, I have more good news: water helps with that too!

Among other things, drinking water flushes out the by-products of fat-breakdown, and helps to regulate your appetite! In fact, whenever you have hunger pains, it could actually just be you mistaking them for ‘dehydration pains’, which feel exactly the same. Also, try drinking a glass of water before you eat and see if that helps with your appetite.

Water is the cheapest and most available weight loss “drug” there is. But you just have to make sure to drink enough of it because of a little thing called:

Water Retention

Common sense might have you think that drinking water will cause water retention because of too much water! So what most people do is drink even LESS water in an attempt to stop water retention… which is actually the worst thing you can do. So ignore your common sense in this scenario!

The main cause of water retention is dehydration. As silly as that sounds, hear me out (or read me out… though that doesn’t sound as good). When you consistently don’t get enough water, your body switches into what I like to call “desert mode” and begins to store water to make sure you have enough to function for the times you don’t allow your body to have enough water… and if your body is retaining it, then that must be pretty often!

To drive the point home even further…

Imagine YOU were stranded in the desert and you are headed north. You have no idea how FAR you have to go North, when you’ll get to where you are going, or even IF you’ll get there, but you just know that you have to keep going North. You are also extremely thirsty because all of your water canteens have run out and you don’t know when the next time you’ll come across any water will be.

Then, along your path you come across a pond of fresh, great tasting water! You drink as much as you can until you can’t possibly take in anymore water. You have to get going though, so what do you do before you leave? You fill up your water canteens of course! And you fill them with as much water as you can hold in hopes of it lasting until the NEXT time you come across some water.

Once again, your body is made up of anywhere from 65-70% water, so your body goes through the same “stranded in the desert” scenario I described above whenever you don’t give it enough water… that’s why it retains as much as it can.

So next time you get mad and think your body is somehow against you because it’s starting to retain water, realize that you’d do the same thing!

On Staying Hydrated…

Once today passes, I highly encourage you to keep up with your water intake because it’s not going to improve your life very much if you only do it for one day. In fact, if you’re currently dehydrated, it’ll take anywhere from a day and a half to two days of drinking enough water to be “caught up”. However, the good news is that you’ll begin taking part in all the benefits I described as soon as you are hydrated.

Try your best to make it a daily habit and you’ll be thankful you did, even if it is hard to remember at first.

Tomorrow’s task is going to be a little less challenging, but can also be relaxing and enjoyable at the same time. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to email updates and you’ll get an email tomorrow notifying you that the article has been published.

Thanks for reading!

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Are You Drinking Enough?