water and salt

 The Real Truth About Water

No one really knows for sure exactly how much water you should drink, and the blanket advice we get is pure hogwash.

For example 

Drink 8 glasses a day.

Now, that may look like sound advice, but further analysis shows it’s an overly simplified wives tail.

To be more blunt: “8 glasses a day” is actually a well established urban legend.

As recently revealed by the American Journal of Physiology, there is absolutely no scientific evidence to support the popular 8-glasses-a-day theory.

Now, none of these scientists at AJP are saying we don’t need water that would be silly. It’s just that these overly simplified platitudes are not helping anyone’s health.

What’s needed is real scientific information and not half-truths.

What we do know is that 8 glasses a day by itself is not good advice.

First, you need to drink water regularly throughout the day. Drinking 8 glasses in the morning and thinking you’re golden for the day is actually dangerous.

You should, in fact, hydrate every single hour.

Drink a glass, or even 1/2 glass of water, every hour

Many people who simply take up the habit of drinking a glass or even half a glass  more about that in a minute every hour notice their energy levels skyrocket.

Why?

Because most of us are chronically dehydrated.

If you don’t think you are, try what I’m advising here for 48 hours and see what happens.

Again, this is a statistically valid safe bet.

Another safe bet: you’re tired all the time and you can’t figure out why.

Dehydration making you tired?

You bet.

Dizziness
Chronic fatigue
Impotence
Hair loss
Headaches
Low back pain
Constipation

Dehydration has been shown quite clearly to be linked to all of these. Merck Manual of Health

What next?

Before you start gulping down, you need to know that how much depends on a lot of factors.

It depends on your body size, how much you exercise, the climate in which you live, and more 

Obviously if you live in a hot climate where you’re sweating all the time a lot of the sweat is invisible  you don’t have to be dripping to be rapidly losing water all day long, you need more  a lot more.

If you exercise even mildly  same thing.

But there’s something important here.

You may think drinking more water by itself is enough, but if you drink too much you can actually overdose on water.

The contestants were ordered to drink a high volume of water and hold their wee for as long as they could.

One of the contestants died as a result.

True story.

Too much water can harm you by either water intoxication as the above Wii casualty, may she rest in peace or by electrolyte imbalance.

Ah, electrolytes 

See, the more water you drink, the more you need to replace your electrolytes.

But before you go thinking you’re going to need to purchase some expensive fancy electrolyte replacement sports drinks, here’s the real deal:

add a pinch of salt to every gallon of filtered water

All you have to do is add a tiny pinch of sea salt to every gallon of filtered drinking water you drink and  voila! you have all the electrolytes you need.

Of course, the sports drink peddlers won’t tell you that. They’d have to sell you a whole lot of sea salt to make the same profit off your back!

If you were simply to apply what we have shown you so far my safe bet is that you’d see a pretty significant bump in your energy.

It’s a damn good question.

The thing about this kind of information is that hearing it is one thing.

Applying it to your life is a whole another animal.

My wish is not just to inform you, but to transform you.

. I live in the hot and humid south, and exercise outside regularly. So here’s my calculation…

I take my body weight, divide by two = how many ounces of water I drink a day.

So if you weigh 200 lbs, divided by 2 = 100 ozs of water per day. I do space my drinks of water throughout the day. And I’m adding a pinch of  salt