Wet your whistle and check the loo!

(Welcome to the new Wednesday edition of A Healthy Wife. Believing that being a good steward of our body is a spiritual responsibility, we will be focusing on some health and nutrition issues each Wednesday. A bit shorter and chocked full of info, Healthy Wife Wednesdays are unashamedly bold and colorful; A mouthful of facts and opinions to chew on all day!)

Wet your whistle and check the loo!

“Mommy, my head hurts.”

“Mommy, my tummy hurts.”

“Wow, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”

“I’m sooo hot!”

“Ugh! My skin is breaking out!”

My husband jokes that my first prescription for any ailment my family complains about is to ask, “Have you been drinking enough water?”

Water is a very basic and powerful “medicine.” Water is vital in circulation, digestion, joint lubrication, bladder and bowel elimination, skin and hair health and much, much more.

There are 2 main things to be concerned with when it comes to water and your health.

Quantity and Quality.

With over 2/3 of your body consisting of water it is pretty important that you get enough of it. You can survive weeks without food but only a few days without water.

You have probably heard several different rules and gauges for making sure you drink enough water. Should you drink a strict 8 glasses a day? What if you work out? Do coffee and tea count?

The best rule of thumb I have found is to take your body weight number in pounds, cut it in half and drink that number in ounces of water each day.

For example, if I weigh 150 pounds I divide 150 in half to get 75. I then try to drink 75 ounces of water each day as a baseline amount.

For me, anything I drink while working out does not count toward my baseline. For others it may. I sweat a lot and often find myself dehydrated. So for me, the more I can drink on a workout day the better.

If you are not into measuring out water and feel much more relaxed about the whole issue, then this other basic rule may work better for you.

Check the color of your urine. Seriously.

It should be very pale yellow to no color at all. If it is basic yellow to darker yellow you should be drinking more water. 

Some people judge their hydration by whether they are thirsty or not, but for me by the time I feel thirsty I am already dehydrated. Listen to your body and do your best to make a good decision. By the way, other drinks such as coffee, tea and soda will actually dehydrate you. These should not count toward your daily total.

The quality of the water you drink is just as important as how much you drink. This can be a very sticky subject with many opinions and facts to wade through.

In my opinion the best water to drink is filtered or cleaned using reverse osmosis. I have read too many problems with distilled, tap and bottled water.  One fact I found stated that up to 40% of bottled water is actually just regular tap water that may or may not have received any additional treatment, flavors, or sweeteners.

For more information, just Google any of these topics and you will have enough reading material to last weeks and I haven’t even mentioned containers and plastics. That could be a whole other blog. Plastic was okay –now it is not. Nalgene was good – now you need HDPE Nalgene… Good old glass is still by far the best, but not always convenient.

When you feel like you are up against the wall and there are no good choices left –then my health mantra will come into play.

“Pray hard. Do your best. God will take care of the rest.”

Now, go get yourself a tall glass of ice water. Drink it down and you will feel a whole lot better!