8 Important Reasons for Drinking Water
Important Reasons for Drinking Water
Water is absolutely essential to the human body’s survival. A person can live for about a month without food, but only about a week without drinking water.
During any normal day, fluid losses occur continuously, from skin evaporation, breathing, urine, and stool, and these losses must be replaced daily for good health. When your water intake does not equal your output, you can become dehydrated. Fluid losses are accentuated in warmer climates, during strenuous exercise, in high altitudes, and in older adults, whose sense of thirst may not be as sharp.
Let us find out some more important and inspiring reasons for drinking more water.
1. Drinking Water Helps Maintain the Balance of Body Fluids.
Your body is composed of about 60% water. The functions of these bodily fluids include digestion, absorption, circulation, creation of saliva, transportation of nutrients, and maintenance of body temperature.
When you’re low on fluids, the brain triggers the body’s thirst mechanism. And unless you are taking medications that make you thirsty, you should listen to those cues and get yourself a drink of water, juice, milk or coffee — anything but alcohol. Alcohol interferes with the brain and kidney communication and causes excess excretion of fluids which can then lead to dehydration.
Drinking water leads to increased energy levels. The most common cause of daytime fatigue is actually mild dehydration.
2. Drinking Water Can Help Control Calories.
For years, dieters have been drinking lots of water as a weight loss strategy. While water doesn’t have any magical effect on weight loss, substituting it for higher calorie beverages can certainly help.
What works with weight loss is if you choose drinking water or a non-caloric beverage over a caloric beverage and/or eat a diet higher in water-rich foods that are healthier, more filling, and help you trim calorie intake.
Food with high water content tends to look larger, its higher volume requires more chewing, and it is absorbed more slowly by the body, which helps you feel full. Water-rich foods include fruits, vegetables, broth-based soups, oatmeal, and beans.
Water helps to maintain healthy body weight by increasing metabolism and regulating appetite.
3. Drinking Water Helps Energize Muscles.
Cells that don’t maintain their balance of fluids and electrolytes shrivel, which can result in muscle fatigue. When muscle cells don’t have adequate fluids, they don’t work as well and performance can suffer.
Drinking water is important when exercising. During exercise, fluids should be drunk at regular intervals to replace fluids lost by sweating.
Being dehydrated can severely hamper your athletic activities, slowing you down and making it harder to lift weights. Exercise requires additional water, so be sure to hydrate before, during and after exercise.
4. Drinking Water Helps Keep Skin Looking Good.
Your skin contains plenty of water, and functions as a protective barrier to prevent excess fluid loss.
Dehydration makes your skin look drier and wrinkled, which can be improved with proper hydration. But once you are adequately hydrated, the kidneys take over and excrete excess fluids.
You can also help “lock” moisture into your skin by using moisturizer, which creates a physical barrier to keep moisture in.
5. Water Helps Your Kidneys.
Body fluids transport waste products in and out of cells. Your kidneys do an amazing job of cleansing and ridding your body of toxins as long as your intake of fluids is adequate.
When you’re getting enough fluids, urine flows freely, is light in color and free of odor. When your body is not getting enough fluids, urine concentration, color, and odor increases because the kidneys trap extra fluid for bodily functions.
If you chronically drink too little, you may be at higher risk for kidney stones, especially in warm climates.
6. Drinking Water Helps Maintain Normal Bowel Function.
Adequate hydration keeps things flowing along your gastrointestinal tract and prevents constipation. When you don’t get enough fluid, the colon pulls water from stools to maintain hydration — and the result is constipation.
Adequate fluid and fiber is the perfect combination, because the fluid pumps up the fiber and acts like a broom to keep your bowel functioning properly.
7. Water Helps in Preventing Many Serious Health Problems.
Drinking water in adequate amounts can decrease the risk of certain types of cancers, including colon cancer, bladder cancer, and breast cancer. Water also reduces your risk of heart attack.
8. Water Helps Reducing Joint and Back Pain.
For a majority of sufferers, drinking water can significantly reduce joint and/or back pain. Water cushions and lubes your joints and muscles.
Tips to Help You Drink More
If you think you need to be drinking more, here are some tips to increase your fluid intake and reap the benefits of water:
- Have a beverage with every snack and meal.
- Choose beverages you enjoy; you’re likely to drink more liquids if you like the way they taste.
- Eat more fruits and vegetables. Their high water content will add to your hydration. About 20% of our fluid intake comes from foods.
- Keep a bottle of water with you in your car, at your desk, or in your bag.
- Choose beverages that meet your individual needs. If you’re watching calories, go for non-caloric beverages or water.
Level of Water for Adults
For healthy sedentary adults living in temperate climates:
Men: 125 oz (3.7 liters) of water per day from all dietary sources
Women: 91 oz (2.7 liters) of water per day from all dietary sources
For most people, this amount of water per day is a lot more than they normally drink. The requirement for men is roughly 1 gallon per day. How many of you men out there drink this much water every single day? For the women, 91 ounces is roughly 3 quarts.
However, an exercising athlete can lose enormous quantities of body water through perspiration. The recommendations listed above don’t apply to endurance athletes.
How Much You Need to Drink Water
The optimum amount of water you should drink depends on your body weight. The fatter you are, the more you need to drink.
Take one-half of the amounts of your weight in pounds and convert that to ounces and that is how many ounces you should be drinking. Thus, if you weigh 128 pounds, you should be drinking 64 ounces a day. If you weigh 300 pounds, you need to drink 150 ounces a day. You can’t just categorize any liquid consumption as being adequate to meet the recommended amount– for example, coffee is a diuretic and causes you to lose water, so you wouldn’t want to try meeting your daily water requirements with large quantities of that. So start drinking water today for a healthy tomorrow.
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