Getting Enough Water in the Summertime - It's Harder than it Sounds
Summertime is upon us; and this is as good a time as any, to take stock of how we choose to stay hydrated. Research has found out that most people only drink enough fluids to just keep clear of dehydration; their bodies almost never get enough water to function completely comfortably. So how do you stay hydrated in the summertime? It would be pretty easy to just go out and grab the most colorful and tempting-looking bottle of whatever is within reach, of course. The problem with that decision though would be that most popular brands on the shelves these days are not really designed to be thirst quenchers at all, completely weighed down with sugar and calories as they are. Sugar uses up water, rather than doing any quenching.
The reason most people only just manage to keep on this side of dehydration, is that we tend most of the time to just rely on our pangs of thirst to tell us that we need water. It would be nice if the body told us enough about how much water it really needed though; in a world filled with taste and temptation, it can be pretty hard to hear the voice of genuine thirst, and tell it apart from a mere craving. So if you can't trust your thirst, how do you know how much water to give yourself? There's an actual formula for this: whatever you weigh in pounds, you calculate 8% of that. The number you get is as many 8 ounce cups of water you need each day. In the summertime, dehydration can be a real risk.
And the symptoms aren't clear to understand either. Most often, when dehydration shows up, you might feel like you were a little cranky, tired, and had a headache. If your child is active with sports in school, you need to be especially attentive to her hydration needs in the summertime. Even professional athletes have a hard time paying enough attention to keeping up with their fluid needs. In the macho arena of professional athletics, even admitting that you are human can earn you quite a bit of ridicule. You're supposed to be a warrior, the Terminator - someone who is a machine with absolutely no needs. Over the past five years, at least two professional athletes have just fallen down and died in the practice field, and have been declared to have died of dehydration.
But that's not to say that you have nothing to worry about if you stay far enough away from athletics. If you are an office worker, and you sit in your air-conditioned room or cubicle all day in the summertime, or a nicely heated pod in the winter, you can quickly cause your body to put out a lot of water to dehydration. Old people living quiet lives by themselves have a pretty serious problem with the hydration too. If you have an old father who lives with you, you need to pay special attention to this; men, when they get older, have real problems with getting all their pee out when they go to the toilet. This happens to be a real annoyance to them, and they begin to restrict the amount of water they drink just because it's so tiresome to have to go to the bathroom all the time. Did you do realize that among people who are older than 65, dehydration is one of the most common reasons people will end up in hospital?
So what drinks actually count as water, and which ones don't? To begin with, tea, coffee and other beverages with caffeine certainly can count towards your water quota for the day. But if you go with the really heavy and sweet and beverages at Starbucks or McDonald's, those won't count. Another thing that won't count is alcohol. As watery as it looks, alcohol can only dehydrate you unless you mix it in with plenty of juice or fizzy water. How about Snapples? Those drinks to look healthy enough, but they come fortified with plenty of sugar, and it would be best to avoid them. Your best way to stay hydrated in the summertime would be to go with plenty of natural fruit (not out of a pack of Tropicana that has too much sugar). And if you are going to go with water, that's a great idea if you don't pick mineral water for it; water is something we used to get for free - and now for every couple glasses, the very thought that we have to throw away a plastic bottle in a landfill for the next 10,000 years can be unsettling.