Quick Hydration Tips

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How often do you make a pact with yourself to drink more water? I've tried a number of strategies to remind myself to drink more, as I find that through my super busy days somehow it gets to be 2 pm and I've barely had any. The strategy that works best for me is to have a clear glass vessel of some kind on my desk (at least 1 L in size). That way, I can see how much I'm drinking and it reminds me every time I look at it. It works pretty well!

Even if you're really good at drinking water, do you give consideration to what kind of water you're drinking, besides than just how it tastes? The quality of your water is equally important as how much you drink, perhaps even more so. Recently I learned a whole lot more about water, and it fired me up a little (in a good way, like I'm going to kick my own butt and drink MORE), but I wanted to share a couple of quick takeaway tips that I learned on hydrating smarter and better.

• Avoid water bottled in plastic bottles (as a reader of PGM, I should hope this one feels obvious). The plastic is often low grade, and chemicals can leach into the water quite easily, espeically as the bottles may get heated in transfer. and crinkling the bottle as you use it further accelerates the process. In a pinch, spring for water bottled in glass.

• When you filter water, be aware of how it's filtered. Many processes simply filter out the taste of chlorine, but leave in many other nasty substances. Tap water is tainted with prescription drugs. everything from prozac to birth control. It's causing havoc on our waterways, and havoc on your body. Other filtration systems, such as reverse osmosis, do almost too good a job filtering the water and remove EVERYTHING, including the healthy minerals our body needs. To learn more about this, click here. Bottom line: you really shouldn't drink unfiltered tap water.

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• If you do have a water filtration system that totally strips your water (such as osmosis), add a bit of pink himalayan salt, or a slice of cuccumber or other fruit. This restores many important minerals your body needs (without this mineral content our cells may not be able to properly absorb the water!).

• Adding lemon to our water is a pretty common practice, but I was surprised to learn that the reason lemon is so powerful at helping us cleanse our bodies is because it's atoms behave differently than those in our bodies. They spin the opposite direction, which has a scrubbing effect. Neat!

• Find a spring. If you can't actually go to a spring, find a company that sells 3 or 5 gallon jugs in glass jars and buy some every so often (and then return the jug for a refund). Springs are the Earth's natural filtration system, offering up water that has filtered through many layers of dirt, rock and sediment, picking up the perfect concentration of minerals on the way. Spring water is also 'alive', meaning that it contains small amounts of healthy bacteria or microorganisms that benefit your body.

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