Water is more important than food. You can go for weeks without eating, but can only go a few days without drinking water. All processes in our body need water to function, and we don’t have a backup system for that. Food? We store surplus food in fat and can live on that for a long time.
That’s why eating healthy actually starts with drinking healthy. By the end of this chapter, you’ll hopefully agree.
Drink enough, drink regularly, and drink simple water
Yes, you can drink too much. But I’d rather you do that than drink too little.
These are general guidelines:
- Drink 2 liters per day. (That’s around 8 cups of water.)
- Drink more on hot days or if you’ve been sweating a lot.
- Drink before you’re thirsty. Once you are already thirsty, you run the risk of “overdrinking”, and you already feel the effects of the water shortage in your body.
- Drink simple water. Coffee, sugar drinks, fruit juices, and such—they are nothing more than water + a harmful substance.
- Don’t confuse water with “soft” or “watery” substances.
Soft substances
What are soft substances? Food that contains a lot of water. Yes, you can get your water intake this way. But, just like coffee, you get your water plus stuff you probably don’t need.
For years, I ate way too much yoghurt. It took me long to realize this, because yoghurt isn’t such a bad thing to eat a lot. But it still wasn’t healthy.
Why did I do this? Because when my mind thought “hey, I’m thirsty”, it also thought “yoghurt contains a lot of water, let’s eat that”. So I created a new habit. I’d start each day by filling a bottle of water and placing it on my desk.
Now I simply drink water when I’m thirsty. It helped a lot to prevent overeating.
Simple water
Because water is so important, we consume a lot of it on any given day.
What does this mean? If you don’t drink just water, but e.g. a sweet drink, you’re subconsiouscly drinking a lot of sugar. You don’t feel bad about it. You are thirsty, so you refresh yourself! But silently, all the extra nutrients you consume are creatig negative consequences.
Again, I did this. I used to drink lemonade when I was thirsty. It meant I drank way too much sugar.
How did I fix this? I told myself: “each day, simply swap one cup of lemonade for a cup of water”. That’s achievable. I have the motivation for that.
After doing this for a week, I swapped two cups for water. Another week, I swapped three cups for simple water. After a month or two, I’d completely lost my habit of drinking sugar all day.
Let me clarify something: no, fruit juices are not healthy. The healthy part of fruit is everything around that sugary inside. That’s what counteracts the sugar. If you take that away, you’re left with just sugar and vitamins. (Of course, juice exists that retains parts of the original fruit, but even that is sketchy.)
Finally, I want to make an exception for (simple) tea. Most tea is simple water with the subtle addition of herbs with good properties. That’s not harmful, and it’s been shown to actually be quite beneficial.
I don’t drink tea, so I can’t speak much from personal experience. After the lemonade disaster, I vowed to just drink simple water at all times 😉
Clean water
This won’t be relevant if you live in a developed country or a relatively modern house. But I lived in an old, run-down house for a long time, which meant the water was easily polluted.
If you think that’s the case, you can buy simple systems for filtering water. You’ll know it works when water suddenly tastes different. (Regular water has many extra minerals that give it the taste we know.)
Again, because water is so crucial, and we drink it every day, even small bits of pollution will add up to severe health effects over time.
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