Water: Is eight enough?

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I ain’t no doctor

a weekly column by charles faris, hhc

Dear Charles,
I read on a list on the internet of 20 Things We Learned Were Wrong This Year that the canard about drinking 8 pints of water daily was wrong. It also said that tea and coffee counted as liquid where i’d been told they didn’t. Something to do with coffee irritating the bladder so the liquid doesn’t hang around. Where is the truth to be found oh non-doc?!
Notorious Londoner

Dear Notorious,
Thanks for the softball! I usually like to play around a while before i bang it out the park, and you’ve set me up too good to resist. The Truth, dear one, lies within. Problem is that the answers and the questions aren’t filed together! So we still have some work to do. Another problem is that with Universe in constant flux, Truth is relative. Here today, gone tomorrow. Different strokes for different folks.

All of which simply means that you will have to suss it out for yourself! The best that i can do is offer you a few ideas about how to stay on the trail of Truth, how to sniff out the water hole as it were.

Know what you are looking for

If you are concerned about getting enough water in your system, it might be helpful to know what “not enough” looks like. Let’s look at a few ideas of what it might look like to be in a water deficit.

Last time I checked, the daily news at the Burning Man Festival, held every August in Black Rock City Nevada, was called the Piss Clear. This was a simple reference to the number one safety issue when living in a hot dry climate: Don’t Get Dehydrated! So one simple thing to look for is just how dark and smelly your urine is. Now the occasional nasty whiff is probably not going to kill you. Dark and smelly on a regular basis however is probably a death sentence for your kidneys. So let’s revise the old phrase: if it’s clear, nothing to fear, if it’s yellow, it’s not mellow.
One of the last things you will notice is a sense of thirst. By the time you are thirsty you are already dehydrated. This is analogous to noticing that there is no money in your bank account. By the time the check bounces it is too late to do anything about it. So far as I know, nobody has an overdraft system in place for proper hydration. That said, a sense of thirst is a strong sign to start drinking! To make like a camel and fill up your tank. What to fill it with, and how to get it full; that’s another story.
That late-arriving sense of thirst often shows up at the end of the train because it is frequently mistaken for a hunger pang. That’s right. A good way to watch your weight and get yourself hydrated is to have a glass of water whenever you feel hungry. If you are still hungry a half hour later then you are probably really hungry. If the hunger passes then were probably just thirsty. Have another glass!
Other symptoms of dehydration include:

dry skin
fatigue
decreased coordination
dry mucous membranes
headaches

Einstein’s Universe: Get relative

This is where we take on “the canard”. That 8 pints a day recommendation is not only “one size fits all”, where of course we come in all sorts of sizes and fits; it’s also relative to where you live! Eight British pints equals 160 ounces. In America we often hear the recommendation for 8-12 ounce glasses, which totals 96 ounces. I know British humor tends to be drier than American humor…is that why you need to drink more water than we do? And why the constant 8?

Then there is the issue of the 100 pound waif and the 250 pound bodybuilder. Same amount of liquid for each? I’m not suggesting throwing away all the recommendations…and how about something that fits our individuality a bit closer. According to Dr. F. Batmanghelidj, author of “Your Body’s Many Cries for Water”, we should drink half our body weight (in pounds, sorry) in ounces of water. So if you are like me and you weigh 180 pounds, 90 ounces a day is the ticket.

That’s a good enough place to start, I suppose, and still there are so many factors that individuate one person from another (and one day from another) that there is no reliable system or law that will tell you how much to drink on a daily basis. You might be old or young, active or sedentary, thin or heavy. The weather might be hot, cold, wet, dry, windy, placid, or any combination. And so where can we turn for the truth other than to ourselves?

A week of living dangerously

According to Alberto Villoldo, a teacher of Native American Shamanism, the Andean shamans say:

“Follow your own footsteps. Learn from the rivers, the trees and the rocks. Honor the Christ, the Buddha, and your brothers and sisters. Honor the Pachamama (the Earth) and the Great Spirit. Honor yourself and all of creation.”

Now for some of us a walk in nature is preceeded by a drive in a car and followed a few hours later by a meal in a restaurant. For others, it isn’t really nature until you are hours away from civilization, and you aren’t going to eat until you kill something.

If you are inclined to check out the dark side, take a week to drink less. Count the tea and the coffee. Compare your life to the descriptions of dehydration above. You’ll see pretty quickly what it’s like to be dehydrated. If you don’t, you can always get darker. Drink less. Dive into the depth of dry. Feels like hell, eh?

A kinder more gentle method

How to get out of the dastardly dryness and discover your own inner dowsing rod? Take a week to catch up. Drink water whenever you feel thirsty or hungry. At least half your weight in ounces each day. Balance tea and coffee with more water. See how you feel compared to the previous week.

Then play around with it. Keep track of your glasses and your symptoms, the weather and your activity level. See what works for you. Remember that every day is different. Pay attention to the seasons. The more you put pen to paper to keep track, the easier it will be to look back and notice your patterns.

You will soon discover that as difficult as it would be to set up a rigorous set up rules to ensure your own proper hydration, it would be 6 billion times more difficult to set up a simple rule for everyone on Planet Earth.

My true hope is that you will then begin to look at all of the other “rules of life” that you have inherited over the years, glean the truth, throw away the false, and personalize them to work for your own individual characteristics and needs. Most of the old rules of life are founded on truth…the challenge is to get down to the foundation and build something that suits you right where you are sitting now.

Charles Faris, hhc

“i ain’t no doctor”