Too much water? How can it be? Don't people typically drink too little?
I've taken a little informal survey around the net, and the results are in. Approximately nine out of ten doctors and health gurus will tell you that you aren't drinking enough water until your back teeth are floating. The popular consensus seems to be that most people are most deficient in water most of the time: a very nebulous statement that would be difficult to verify one way or the other (and I can't find a study that has been done to prove it); all the more so because there does not seem to be a precisely defined point at which a person is under-hydrated. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and suppose that they rightly say "most people on the modern diet are under-hydrated", but I have taken pause to reflect upon a lesson that I have well learned the hard way: a person with the right information may still arrive at the wrong conclusion.
It seems very unfortunate, to me, that the people who are the most careful with their health, the very people who escape the processed foods and Allopathic medicine industries, still end up trusting people with wrong information and/or conclusions and continue to be the victims of an industry. Because we stopped trusting mainstream doctors, the food pyramid, and "Big Agra", we took in, without discrimination, everything that seemed to stand in opposition to them. Suddenly, everyone who has spent enough hours surfing the web to sound like they know what they're talking about has become an expert. Since I am happy to share what I think I know with others, I'm no exception. I must remind myself daily to be careful not to slip into the arrogance of a new orthodoxy, and to take thought rather than regurgitate information, lest not only the blind man, but those he guides, fall into a pit together.
Even so, whether it be the old paradigm or the new, the government sponsored modality or the modalities of long traditions, I remain a skeptic. When it comes to health, proven physiology trumps all, of course, and after physiology are controlled studies: but in the absence of overwhelming scientific evidence, personal experience and common sense become our brightest lights to follow; and where science fails, philosophy rules.
What then should we say? How much water should we drink? (How sad that we have lost the most basic knowledge of caring for our own bodies!) My conclusion is from personal experience, from common sense, from philosophy, with sprig of real science thrown in for garnish.
First, when we are told that we're all supposed to drink eight tall glasses daily, or half our body weight in ounces daily, etc. we should hear this as alarm bells in our minds. We should all know well enough by now that the one-size-fits-all health and medical advice is the most amateurish form of quackery. Every person has a different health story and different requirements. If you can accept this one fact alone, you can give yourself permission to put down the water bottle when you feel like you're drowning.
Personally, I seldom drink more than 20 ounces in a day, and don't seem to be suffering from it. In fact, I'm enjoying the best health of my life.
Second, body composition tests typically range from 35% up to 85%, thus we often hear that the median 60% is "normal" (but remember that just because something comes to be regarded as normal, doesn't mean it is healthy). Since we can't pin down what percentage of our body should be "water", let's relax a little about meeting the numbers until the certainty is there.
Third, we need to understand something extremely crucial about how hydration works. When water enters our body it quickly gets absorbed directly into the bloodstream and filtered through the kidneys. It doesn't sit in the gut for hours as our solids do. Since the process of hydrating the blood vessels is quick, the electrolytes suspended in our plasma can become greatly diluted if we take in too much water too quickly. If we're now pushing more of this blood through our kidneys more of our electrolytes are being passed through the ureters, to the bladder, and out. Thus, what we have actually accomplished by taking in too much water too quickly is further dehydrating ourselves.
Fourth, molecules of H20 never appear by themselves in water. They appear as large clusters of many molecules together, making water structuring an important factor in hydration of individual cells. This is accomplished best by getting our water from the foods we eat, since water in plants appear in smaller clusters and come already packaged with our necessary electrolytes: sodium, magnesium, potassium. Plants, like humans, are mostly water (only better hydrated typically), with fruits and leafy greens ranging from about 65% to 85% water content. These foods have been shown to be up to ten times more hydrating than an equivalent volume of water. So if you're eating a healthy plant-based diet, you aren't going to need to drink as much.
Taking these last two facts into consideration, it appears impossible to ever drink enough water in a day to properly hydrate oneself - at least on the typical western diet of meats and breads. If you're going to eat dry, processed, dead foods and high protein foods (proteins require extra water to digest), you're going to have to drink as much water as you safely can. This means slowly, sip by sip throughout the day but away from your meal times.*
Fifth, we have different body compositions, live in different environments, and have different levels of physical activity that will cause us to lose different amounts of water through our pores. So there's no use for me, as a 135 Ib. man with a BMI score of 19.9 who lives in the Pacific Northwest and works indoors as a technician, to compare myself to a 250 Ib. man with a BMI of 25 who lives in the deep South and builds houses for a living. Is it reasonable to think that we should be strict about following the same guidelines?
Sixth, and most important of all, we should, rather than counting our ounces, pay closer attention to the signals our bodies are giving us. The human body is the most elaborate system in the known universe and crowning achievement of creation. It was designed with great intelligence by a still greater intelligence. Unless we've managed to override the messages our body is sending to our consciousness by artificial means (which happens all too frequently thanks to such things as neurotoxins and damaged dopamine receptors, e.g.), it's very good at telling us what it needs. We know the symptoms of dehydration: weakness and fatigue, dizziness and sudden vertigo upon standing, headache, impaired cognitive function, muscle cramps, dry, hard stools, constipation, dry skin, dry mouth, and even thirst itself.
And that brings me to the philosophical part. In the state of nature, if the cult of people in the white coats had never organized, would we ever think about taking a drink before we got thirsty? Or did humans everywhere experience nothing but deteriorating health down through the ages because they weren't calculating their body weights in ounces? I think not.
So, rather than adding stress to your equation, if you're starting to get a little bit thirsty...drink.* As my daughter would say... "Duh, Dad."
- The caveat is that if you do drink during your meals, or while the food is still in your stomach, you dilute both your digestive enzymes and your stomach acids, effectively raising the pH in the stomach and hindering proper digestion. So, ideally, try to give yourself about half an hour from your last drink before you eat, and at least two hours after your meal before you drink again. But again, I can't stress this enough, NO STRESS!! or you really won't digest anything at all. (And if you keep to this practice of drinking only between meals and find that you do not have enough time in the day to hydrate sufficiently, my best recommendation is to completely turn away from the typical modern diet, and start eating more fresh, whole plant foods and fewer animals.)