Water Usage

Water usage remains one of the most vital and basic of needs. As a matter of fact, everyone has to have it to survive. We all need it. Some may need more than others but the requirement stays.

Water Usage Vital For Life

One cold hard fact of life                                         

To stay healthy                                                      

You must have water

Brain and brawn

Guts and blood

All joints move on water

At the consistency of

The salty sea

Drink it brother

Drink it down

How Much To Drink

 How much water should you drink? No one knows but you.

We are overwhelmed with confusing information on how much water to drink. Also, the experts do not agree on what liquids to consider as water and what purity of water might be ideal for us to drink.

Doctor Batmanghelidj has labored 25 years in this field and he says tap water is just fine. He has found that water is nature’s miracle medicine. www.twbookmark.com. Your Not Sick Your Thirsty, This is a book that is well worth reading for anyone who is serious about getting healthy and staying healthy.

Doctor Joseph Mercola says only highly filtered water without fluoride is safe to drink. The No Grain Diet, www.nograin.com. This is a very good book for you who want to eat healthily without a lot of extremism.

Doctor Atkins was a strong advocate of keeping adequately hydrated.

The Right Water Usage For You

Most experts agree that the average body can only process about eight ounces of water per hour and you should drink enough water to keep your urine a light yellow or straw color. This takes more water usage during hot weather or when you are working your body hard.

There also seems to be a general agreement that quite often when we think we are hungry we are really only thirsty. Hunger and thirst only last about 20 minutes before they are somehow placed on the minds back burner to be called up at a later moment.

Some professionals say that any liquid including soup should be counted as water. We will talk about how you can decide what is right for you. How much to drink, when to drink it, when to sip it, what form and at what temperature.

Prepare For Activity

An eight-ounce glass is not one of the super sized glasses or cups that hold sixteen to twenty ounces.

I want to bring several considerations to the forefront for water usage. We will talk about each of these but only you can make the final decision. You must know your body and its needs.

Prepare for exertion by drinking enough water ahead of schedule.

Use “sports drinks” of fortified water when required, they can be important when you have depleted your electrolytes; this can be caused by sweating, not ingesting enough salt, or even by drinking too much water which can dilute the electrolytes.

The American Indians in Mexico carried the Spanish load all day while the Spanish rode the burrow. The Indians, who walked all day in the tropical sun, only drank warm water and ate one meal of corn each morning. Smart people -they survived.

Everyone Is Different

You hear the old saw that one should drink eight glasses of water each day. Should a big burly placid person drink the same amount of water as a scrawny model such as Ms. Twiggy? A truck driver would not get much work done if he had to consume the same amount per pound of him as a model would if she was the one who should drink eight- eight ounce glasses of water. This all needs to be taken into consideration when we talk of portions.

You will need to use your own judgment and find your own measuring method. One way is to keep your urine a light yellow or a nearly white. If you are working your body hard on a hot day you might never attain the color of urine you consider proper.

Basic Principles

We must look at some basic principles of staying adequately hydrated.

Dr. Batmangelidj says that you need the water to be in your system one half hour before a meal. This gives the body time to have it ready to process your food and not be in the stomach.

Doctor Joseph Mercola, director of The Optimal Wellness Center and author of The No Grain Diet, www.nograindiet.com says, “Drinking fluids with meals dilutes the gastric digestion, making your food difficult to digest. A few sips of water during the meal is fine.”

If you try to obtain a full stomach by filling it with lots of water, you will only be hungry sooner. Too much liquid will interfere with the work of the stomach acids and make the greases in the food float to the top and this can give you heart burn. Then you will need to take antacids. Be nice to yourself.

Avoid drinking a lot of water until two hours or more after eating a meal.

Spread Out Your Water Usage

One method is to drink water at definite intervals of the day.

When I worked in a steel mill the heat was quite intense and the men would head for the nearest bar for some drinks of beer. As a matter of fact, the beer satisfied three needs. It supplied water, electrolytes, and some carbohydrates, to say nothing of a legal drug that made the hot tired body feel a little better.

Needless to say the throat got some much needed cleansing. Most of the men added a shot of cheap whiskey to form a boilermaker. Good stuff this.

Give yourself water before you drink favorite beverage and you may find that you didn’t really want the pop, beer, or coffee. Big surprise, you may like it.

Drink Water First

Treat milk and juices as the food they are. When you are thirsty, drink a glass of water before your first sip of pop, beer, coffee or any other liquid. If a glass of water is too much just try a sip at first.

Also, another surprising find will be that you will relearn to like water. You may even find that you will hunger for plain old everyday unflavored, unadulterated tap water.

Doctor Batmanghelidj says that most of the world’s health problems stem from not drinking enough water. Furthermore, he blames a water shortage for causing high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, high cholesterol and a host of other illnesses. He has spent a lifetime studying these problems.

Since this new way of quenching your thirst cost nothing, and is almost guaranteed to be beneficial, why not try it for a few weeks?

Keep both eyes open to avoid the extremist.

I promise myself that I will drink enough water to keep myself healthy.