Water makes up 70% of our own body. It cleanses us from the inside, gives our organs strength to function properly and circulates our blood. Yet over 70% of us don’t know how to drink water the right way. That’s probably because most of us aren’t even aware there is a right or wrong way to drink water in the first place. On this planet, every animal and bird knows where to drink water from, how much water to drink and when to drink it.
On the other hand, we have lost touch with our body’s needs for so long that we’re coming up with all kinds of strange theories about drinking water.
Some say we should drink 5 liters daily while others say we should drink 8 glasses. Some say we should drink a lot in the morning. Some drink it hot while others drink it cold.
What do you do? Don’t worry! In this blog, we’re going to show you 5 simple ways to drink water properly.
1. Don’t drink your water. Eat your water.
“But how can I chew a liquid with my teeth?”
No! You don’t have to chew it. Eating your water means simply taking a sip, swishing it in your mouth for a while and then drinking it. This is also an important principle mentioned in several Ayurvedic texts.
What’s the point of this? It creates saliva in your mouth, which mixes with water. Just like how saliva is necessary for digesting food, it’s necessary to digest liquids too.
Eating your water means simply taking a sip, swishing it in your mouth for a while and then drinking it.
If we gulp down the whole bottle at once, it doesn’t allow our alkaline saliva to mix with water. So it can’t stabilize the digestive acids in our stomach and we may experience an upset stomach.
2. Drink room temperature water
Do you love downing a cold glass of water on a hot summer afternoon? How about adding a couple of ice cubes to our beverage? It sure seems like a good idea to quickly cool down your body on the surface. But what really happens when this cold water goes into your body? It shocks the body.
Your internal system functions most efficiently at room temperature. So whenever you drink something too cold or too hot, the body has to work twice as hard to bring it down to room temperature. It can only send it to the rest of the body after doing that.
But if you still crave for cool water, trust Mother Nature to do it for you. Buy a clay pot, they’re cheap and can add good aesthetics to your space too. It will only cool the water down as much as it’s required for your body. Lukewarm water is okay to drink in winters as long as it’s not too warm.
3. Keep the right gap between eating and drinking water
Eating and drinking sounds like a match made in heaven, right? We see people doing it all the time – at home, office, or at restaurants. Those popular combo meals seem like they wouldn’t be complete without a delicious beverage as a part of them. Unfortunately, this is one of those myths that have been ignored for far too long. But you know what you can’t ignore? The indigestion, acidity, gas, and other health problems you’ll face if you keep doing this every day.
Did you know there’s a fire in your stomach to digest your food? In Ayurveda, we call it Jatharagni or digestive fire. When you drink water while eating, immediately before or after eating, it extinguishes your digestive fire and your food doesn’t digest. Soon, it starts rotting inside because of problems like gas, bloating, and acidity.
So remember, keep a 1 hour gap before or after your meals for drinking water. If you really want to drink water while eating, then have 1 or 2 small sips squishing the water and drinking it. Don’t drink the whole glass.
4. Use clay or glass bottles to drink water
Plastic bottles may seem like the most obvious option when it comes to water bottles. They’re light, easily available everywhere, and they don’t break. But you need to take a closer look at what they’re doing to your water? How close? Microscopically close. Because the damage they’re doing is hidden from your eyes.
You see plastic bottles may look like they’re super sturdy and last for a lifetime, but they’re slowly leaching microplastics into our water.
These microplastics contain harmful chemicals that disrupt our endocrine system and lead to a variety of health problems like IBS, heart disease, reproductive diseases, and even DNA damage. Even when you dispose them, these microplastics continue leaching into our rivers and our soil. Eventually, they get into the foods we eat and come back to damage our health again. So they’re a burden to your health as well as the environment.
You can choose from any of these safe and sustainable water bottle alternatives – clay, copper, steel, or glass.
5. Trust your thirst
How much water do I need to drink every day? Not even a billion dollar research study could answer that for you. Why? Because it can’t take into account what your lifestyle is. Let’s say if we accepted 8 glasses of water a day as our daily benchmark. Should you ignore your thirst after doing a long trek on a hot summer day just because you finished your quota? Should you force yourself to drink 8 glasses even when you have nothing to do on a cold winter day? No! You simply trust your thirst.
No one can tell us how many glasses you should drink in a day. How much water you need to drink depends on your lifestyle, what you eat, how much you sweat, whether you sit in the AC the whole day or work outside. We all have our own unique water needs.
But if you’re curious, there is a simple test to check if you’re drinking enough water or not. You don’t have to go to the lab for it. Just go to your bathroom and observe the colour of your urine.
If your urine is dark yellow, it means your body is severely dehydrated. If your urine is light yellow or almost white, it means your body is getting enough water.
We have also shared a few bonus tips for naturally filtering your water and how to avoid feeling thirsty during your meals in our YouTube video on this topic. Check it out! Tell us in the comments below if you have any questions about drinking water.
