Why water?

Water is the most important nutrient in the body:

• Improves oxygen delivery to cells
• Transports nutrients
• Enables cellular hydration
• Cushions bones and joints
• Regulates body temperature
• Removes wastes and flushes toxins
• Empowers the body’s natural healing process

Dehydration

So now we are all aware that we need to be drinking water. However, according to the statistics, it appears that over 75% of people are dehydrated! Why? And what exactly is dehydration? Dehydration is a condition that occurs when you don’t have enough water in your body to meet optimal functional requirements. Your body loses 1.5-2.5 litres of water per day on average. We can lose 237 ml simply exhaling.

A decrease in our body’s water content of only 2% can cause fatigue, a 10% drop and we are already looking at significant health concerns such as: digestion complications, cardiovascular strain, immune stress, musculoskeletal impacts.

Let your hydration levels decrease more than 10% and you can be facing more serious complications, death being one of them.

• Fatigue
• Anxiety
• Irritability
• Depression
• Cravings
• Cramps
• Headaches

These are a few of the early signs of dehydration. Ignore these and you can move on to:

• Heartburn
• Joint pain
• Back pain
• Migraines
• Fibromyalgia
• Constipation
• Colitis

How many people have had these symptoms today? How many of you get a headache and have a Panadol? Good chance it’s the glass of water that helped your headache not the Panadol! That just added stress to your liver!

Something to think about over the tropical holiday season especially when some may be inclined to indulge in a little excess consumption.

Pain medication is silencing our body’s cry for water causing serious and avoidable side effects while continuing to increase the dehydration that was a misinterpreted signal to drink some water. Our poor bodies, the kidneys and liver now have extra work to do while not receiving the hydration required to
eradicate the toxin sent in to remove the ‘pain’ that will inevitably only get worse.

Have Some Water! How Much Water?

One way to get a good gauge on how much water you need is to take your weight and divide it by 30. If you weigh 80kgs / 30 you should be drinking 2.6 so be safe and say 3 litres. Round up not down. This is Townsville and our humidity is thirsty work!

Our bodies can produce 8% of its daily water needs through metabolic processes but the remaining 92% we have to ingest through foods and beverages.

Now choose wisely – diuretics dehydrate you. Your fruit juice, coffee and all alcoholic beverages do not count towards hydration points. For every one of
these fluids you need to have another glass of water to make up.

According to Peter Bennett ND and Stephen Barrie ND; “Dehydration causes the accumulation of waste in the blood. The resulting blood toxicity has a profound effect on human health and metabolic efficiency.”

Hydration is so simple.

It’s the first thing we should be doing in the morning, and the last thing we should do before we go to bed. Drink some water. Sip it through the day; carry it in a bottle with you everywhere. Our bodies put up with enough; the least we can do is keep ourselves hydrated.