Your body is roughly 60% water. It’s essential to your survival and helps to ensure you can perform everyday tasks. Water helps to carry signals around your body, allowing your brain to control the various muscles and organs in your body. It also helps the transfer of nutrients into your body and carries away toxins.
Your body does expel water throughout the day. You lose water through sweat, urine, and even in your stools. Naturally, you need to replace this water to stay healthy and keep your body functioning normally. That’s why you’ll often hear experts telling you to drink eight glasses of water a day.
The Quality Of Your Water
However, before you grab a glass it is important to assess the quality of your water. Although all tap water is treated, the treatment aims to kill pathogens in the water and remove debris. What it doesn’t do is remove heavy metals, minerals, and the chemicals that the water treatment plant puts in the water.
In short, if you want the best quality water you don’t just use the water from the tap. The best option is to invest in a reverse osmosis filter that removes these contaminants, giving you much better quality water.
Drinking Quantities
It should be noted that eight glasses is quite vague. After all, glasses come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. This is a good general guide, providing the glasses are 300-500ml each.
The majority of the water you consume is drunk. Experts estimate just 20% of your daily needs are absorbed through food. The average man will need nearly four litres of water while a woman is closer to three litres.
However, this quantity can vary depending on several factors:
Weather
If the weather is hot you’re going to sweat more. This speeds up the rate of water loss and means you’ll need to drink more water every day.
Exercise
Equally, if you’re exercising you’re likely to be sweating and that means you’ll be losing more water. The harder the exercise the more water you’ll lose and the more you’ll need to drink.
Combine exercise and heat and you will lose water rapidly. In this scenario, you should be drinking water as you exercise to help combat dehydration.
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Getting Enough Water
To help ensure you are drinking enough water try the following:
Listen To Your Body
Your body will tell you when it needs water. In fact, feeling hungry is often a sign that you’re thirsty. It’s easy to mix the signals. That’s why you should drink some water when you feel hungry and then wait a few minutes to see if the hunger passes.
Sip Regularly
To help stay hydrated you should get a reusable water bottle and fill it up with your filtered water. You can then carry it with you and sip it regularly.
Add Flavours
To help you drink more water add some natural flavours. The easiest way of doing this is to put a slice of fruit in your water, it will give the water a natural and pleasant flavour.