Water, Water Everywhere - But How Much Should I Drink?

We know the phrase “you are what you eat” but we equally “are what we drink”. However one of the issues we have today is that while water covers 2/3 of the earth only 3% of that water is fresh and only 1% of that water is accessible to humans. Additionally a very real challenge to human beings and their access to water is the level of pollution that is now in natural water. In 90% of the developing world waste water is discharged, untreated, into local rivers. In China 80% of the country's major rivers are so degraded they no longer support fish; many Eastern European rivers run yellow with industrial poisons and indeed the Thames in London has had issues of decreasing sustainability of marine life due to levels of pollution. I believe at the time or writing this has been improved thankfully. 

This creates more of a challenge to humans although in the western world we are utterly spoilt with the fact that we have tap water available to us almost everywhere. Healthy humans need to have a consistent and regular flow of water through our bodies. I want you for a second to imagine rivers running in the wild. If a river flows smoothly and naturally the water will be clear, it will glisten, and it will make sound and attract life to it. There will be flowers growing around, it animals will be drawn towards it and it will be a source of life. 

 

I now want you to imagine what happens to that river when the water stops flowing. Imagine the stagnation, the stench, the lack of life and imagine how likely animals are to be drawn towards it? The same happens in the body which is why water must be replenished consistently but also while why we must pump that water around our body. 

 

I am very much an advocate of a doctor called Batmanghelidj who has done a large number of studies of the impact of water and has written several really good books on the subject (The Bodies many Cries For Water & Water & Salt: Your Bodies healers from Within are my 2 favourites). He directs that to determine how much water a human being should drink you take your weight in kilogrammes you multiply it by 0.033 and that will give you the amount of water you should drink each day in litres . 

 

 

This can often be quite a large volume which can be daunting, especially when one realises that this must be consumed each and everyday! The common mistake most people make when trying to achieve this is to think “well that's okay I'll have a pint when I wake up, I'll have a pint of water after breakfast, another at lunchtime and before you know it I'll be at my 21/2 or 31/2 litres of water a day.” 

 

Unfortunately that doesn't work. 

 

The reason for this is that the stomach can only absorb 1 mouthful of water at a time. So of the pint that you drink first thing in the morning one mouthful gets absorbed the other 95% of the pint gets passes straight through you and into the toilet 30-90 minutes later. It is imperative that the water must be drunk IN SIPS throughout the day. 

 

The good news is that when you get into a habit of having water to hand at all times and into the habit of drinking it you one mouthful, at a time you will very quickly start to feel the benefit: 

 

 

There will however be a period of time during which you will feel like you are running to the toilet constantly! The good news on this is that it will pass (if you’ll excuse the pun…..) within a space of about 10 days when your body will get used to the extra water you're drinking and you will no longer feel that you spend half your life in the lavatory. 

 

There is a genuine a useful debate to be had about water quality, however I am not going to go into that in this blog. It is a subject for genuine consideration, to understand exactly what is in our water, even the water that we have that comes out of our taps here in the UK, but there are also questions to be raised about about the pollution impact of bottled water, the cost of shipping and bottling it, not to mention whether it is actually better for you at all. 

 

The purpose of this blog post is to advise you that you should be drinking water everyday; you should drink a set amount determined by your body weight and you should be drinking that in sips throughout the day. If you do that it will provide you with a really positive step forward in terms of your health. 

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