The following is the transcript from my Podcast - The Healthy Celiac Podcast. If you would prefer to listen, you can do so here or on your fave Podcast App.
Perhaps you've heard over and over that you need to drink eight glasses of water a day (hot tip - that quantity is so outdated!). And you've heard lots of different information from many places, but maybe you don't really understand the true benefits of drinking water. This week I really wanna talk with you about all the amazing benefits of drinking water and help you come up with an amount of water you need to drink for your personal self.
So we're gonna do a little maths equation at the end, not my favorite thing, but all you are going to need to do is grab your phone out and use your calculator on there, and it will give you a water quantity for what you need to be working towards. So we'll do that at the very end.
Please be sure to read to the end as I’m confident you will learn something that you never knew before. It's just going to make you want it drink more water, because there might be one of these health issues that you are having, and you are not realizing that it's just as simple as dehydration is causing it.
As adults, we are made up of 60% water and when we are dehydrated, it causes many different health issues.
so let’s dive right in and learn the
20 Reasons Your Body Needs Water
Are you ready?
1. Water helps form saliva and mucus, which in turn can help you avoid having bad breath, which is fantastic. And it helps to break down your food. So when you have enough saliva, that is actually what helps to break down your food as digestion actually starts in the mouth. It's very important to make sure that you've got enough saliva and water helps you with that.
2. Water helps to deliver oxygen throughout the body.
As blood is 90% water, this is why a lack of water can cause a lack of energy. So basically, there's a shortage of proper oxygen supply going through your blood and when you drink enough water, it helps move that oxygen through your body and makes you have more energy. So that's a massive bonus.
3. Water boosts your skin health and your overall beauty
Who doesn't want that, right? Water flushes out toxins. So when we think of the toxins that we're exposed to, the water actually helps to flush those out of our body and helps improve our skin. Water also helps plump up our skin. So a lot of premature wrinkles are caused from dehydration. It's a really simple way to help with your overall beauty
4. Water boosts productivity
So what happens when we drink water is it replenishes our energy. Just like helping with the oxygen in our blood is it helps us have more productivity in our day. This makes it super important to make sure we're drinking enough water when we're working and when we're studying for example.
5. Water lubricates your joints.
Our joints are made from cartilage, which is basically 80% water. So water can stop that long term dehydration, which causes joint pain. So if you've got joint pain in perhaps your shoulder, your knees, your elbows, simply try drinking more water and see if that pain eases up.
You might be reaching for painkillers or arthritis medications when it could really be as simple as you are just dehydrated.
6. Water regulates your body temperature. So basically what happens is we sweat and that sweat cools us down and that makes us feel better. But when we don't have enough water in our system, basically what happens is our body builds up heat within it. This makes it extra important to make sure that we are regulating our body temperature through drinking water and not just relying on just air conditioning and things like that.
We can also make ourselves feel cooler by drinking cold water. I can’t drink cold water in Winter as my body feels way too cold but I love drinking cold water in Summer.
7. Water helps flush out waste. So when we think of waste, we think of things like sweat, urine and feces/poo. Now what happens is water helps to push all those nasties out of our body that we don't need.
8. Water helps to maintain a healthy digestive system.
Number 7 kind of ties into number 8 which is super important for us with celiac disease. We need to make sure that we keep on top of keeping a healthy digestive system and what it does is it helps us prevent getting constipation. Often people get constipation because they are simply dehydrated. A lot of the time, it's not really related to food, it can just be dehydration.
So if you find that you get backed up a bit, then drinking more water can certainly help with that. I encourage you to increase your water intake because of that reason alone.
A lack of water can increase acidity in your stomach. If you have issues with stomach ulcers, it can actually be related back to a lack of water.
9. Water reduces fatigue
If you've been in an office environment and been in a meetings and you start to yawn, perhaps you’ve thought, “Oh, I need another coffee. I can't stay awake. I'm so tired”. It's usually dehydration.
If you’re at work or you are studying and you start to lose concentration and you're mind is wandering, or you’re yawning have a sip of water.
Try that, just reach for the water sip, sip, sip and always have water near you. You'll find that water helps reduce your fatigue.
10. Water helps to cushion your body tissues. So think of, um, like your brain, your spinal cord and other sort of sensitive tissue areas because water forms the majority of our body. Alack of it water can have severe effects in terms of the brain's functioning. So, you know, long term dehydration can definitely cause problems with you're thinking skills for example.
I know for me, when I get up first thing in the morning, my brain is not right. I need to have water straight away.
And once I drink water, I feel like that brain fog and fatigue goes away from my brain and I start to feel better, straight away in the morning. It’s definitely important to make sure that we cushion those very sensitive areas.
11. Water maintains blood pressure
This one is very interesting and I don't think enough people get told this.
When we have a lack of water, it makes our blood thicker, which results in blood pressure problems. Ensure that you're drinking water because of this huge benefit.
This is a massive benefit long term. So if you don't become dehydrated later on in life, you may not have issues that many people have, when it comes to blood pressure and needing medication.
12. Water supports your mineral and nutrient intake
We're constantly taking in minerals and nutrients from our food. We actually need water to help dissolve those, to move it through the body.
As one of the main reasons we need food is for the nutrients, it makes sense that we do the best we can to get all the benefit from those nutrients, would t you agree?
13. Water helps with kidney function. Our kidneys require water to flush out the unwanted waste from the body.
We don't wanna be getting kidney stones. That's a lot of pain that you don't need to go through and yeah, water, water, water, water. Amazing.
I honestly cannot bang on enough about how amazing water is and if you're not drinking enough of it, I really urge you to jump on the bandwagon, make sure you're drinking enough water and you'll notice a huge difference within your body.
14. Water can help promote weight loss.
If you are reaching for drinks like soda pop or soft drink, as we call it here in Australia or juices, things like that, that's adding up extra sugar in your body that you don't need. Whereas when you drink water that helps to reduce the unwanted sugar and calories in your body though.
Choosing water over other drinks is highly recommended for weight loss.
15. Water boosts your exercise performance.
For those of you that love to exercise, this is a good one for you. Your muscles will tire out quickly when they are dehydrated. Water can help you get a better and a longer workout, which is super cool as well.
If your muscles are feeling fatigued, it could simply be that they're dehydrated.
Drinking water before, during and after exercise is super important.
16. Water supports your airways
When you are dehydrated, it can constrict your airways to prevent more water loss. This is your body naturally trying to look after you, but what it does is it can cause other issues. So for those of you that are asthmatic, it can actually aggravate asthma and it can also aggravate allergies. You don't want to be dehydrated and causing issues with your airways. So if you have anything like asthma, I recommend that you see how much better you to when you are drinking enough water and see if that makes a difference to the way that you breathe and the way that you react.
17. Water can alleviate illness.
During illness, it’s important to replace fluids that you may be losing. For example if you're sick and you're losing fluid through mucus, you need to replace those fluid losses.
Water can also help flush out any impurities and prevent dehydration and headaches during times of sickness.
If you think back to a time when you've been ill and perhaps started to feel worse and worse as the time went on, this can happen if you're not drinking water, because you need to keep that hydration up, you need to make sure you keep that water level up.
18. Water gives you a clearer mindset. So we kind of touched on this before but you definitely have a clearer mindset, being able to think clearer and, avoiding that brain fatigue is very important.
Make the first thing that you do when you get up in the morning to have a big glass of water and see how much clearer you feel in
the head.
19. Water improves your immune system
With everything that's been happening the past couple of years, I don’t think there’s been a better time to focus on improving our immune system. Drinking a lot of water can help flush out all the harmful things that you may be in your body and therefore boost your immune system. So definitely one to be focusing on at this point in time.
20 Water can help you avoid a hangover. Very simple one to finish on here, guys.
I’ve got a funny story to tell you just quickly. So we used to live up in Darwin in the Northern Territory which is the top end of Australia and it's very hot. It's hot all year round. And we had family come and stay with us over Christmas one year and one particular family member thought that it would be fun to sit outside on our balcony and drink alcohol all day long. And he basically drank beer and nothing else. My husband said to this family member, “You're gonna need to drink water, or you're gonna get sick. You, you can't just drink beer. It's too hot up here”. He had come from Tasmania, which is a very cold part of Australia. And he didn't wanna listen.
I can recall a response something along the lines of “Beers got water in it. She'll be right”. Such an Aussie response!!
And lo and behold, he got so sick. He didn't just get a hangover. He was really, really sick for days and ruined the rest of his holiday.
I think he spent the rest of his trip in the bedroom with the air conditioner on trying to feel better because he didn't take our advice and drink water.
So you need to drink water if you're drinking alcohol.
You can listen to my podcast episode on which alcohol is gluten free, we do talk about that in there a little bit, but yeah, definitely, definitely need to be drinking water when you're drinking alcohol as well to avoid a hangover or getting sick.
I hope that those 20 little bits of info on why you should drink water helps inspire you to focus on drinking water.
And if you don't know how much water you should be drinking, I've got a little equation here for you.
But if you wanna grab a pen and paper just quickly or jot it straight into your phone, it's, it's basically to focus on this as a minimum. Now, if you are pregnant, if you are breastfeeding or you exercise a lot, you'll need to increase this by a fair bit. But for those of you that want to work out the minimum amount for your body, this is how you work it out… So as I said earlier, we are 60% water. So obviously if you weigh more, you're going to be more water aren't you? This means you're going to need to drink more water. I don't love it when I hear ’drink eight glasses of water a day’ because that is not relevant to every body, right?
So for your body, what you need to do, you need to make it a goal to drink 32 milliliters of water per kilo of your body weight every day.
And I know I'm talking another language you, for those of you that don't work in kilograms and mils, I'm sorry. But if you could convert your weight to kilos, then that would be fantastic.
Let’s say we have someone that weighs 90 kilograms. They would basically need to drink a minimum of 2.9 litres of water a day.
To calculate how much water you need to be drinking, you take your body weight in this case, an example of 90 kilos, and you multiply it by 0.32, and that equals 2.88 litres. And I've just rounded it up to 2.9 litres.
Check out the infographic below and work out your ideal water quantity.
I hope that helps. And I'd love to hear from you. If this episode has inspired you to drink more water for all those amazing health benefits. So be sure to send me a message on Instagram thehealthyceliac
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