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What makes you dehydrate so severely so often? I've never had this happen, and I'm not that on-the-ball about hydration.

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I drink an inordinate amount of coffee (and often a few servings of beer the night before) and exercise quite a bit.

I'm bad about drinking water

Are you constantly incredibly thirsty? Coffee isn't actually a net loss in water - as Zerofries suggested, something else is wrong, or you're drinking a lot of beer all the time(which I'd argue is probably also "something wrong").

Caffeine is a diuretic. If he isn't drinking decaf, it's a net loss.

While it is, it doesn't lead to a net loss in hydration.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...

https://nationalpost.com/health/nutrition-fact-or-fallacy-do...

http://time.com/5192272/coffee-tea-dehydrating/

https://www.webmd.com/diet/qa/does-caffeine-have-a-dehydrati...

One can dehydrated not in a sense of having not enough water, but in the sense of not having enough salts to hold the water in body. In this case, the water you drink just becomes urine very fast and doesn't quench thirst at all. Just taking a bit of bare salt is not a solution either, you have to get some kind of an oral rehydration solution (either a specialized one, an isotonic drink, or maybe eat some soup if your apetite is not impaired). More about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_rehydration_therapy and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

Yeah, they make special salt packets you can use called Oral Rehydration Salts that have an osmolal ratio of electrolytes plus just enough glucose to cause your upper intestine to rapidly take the fluids in. If you are severely dehydrated drinking a liter of the stuff is enough to restore you to sanity within about half an hour. I usually carry one or two packets in my hiking/climbing first aid kit. Trioral is a really common brand.

Mountaineering is strenuous and all-day enough that you drink water all day, and hyponatremia is a serious concern from drinking straight water for some people, like me. So what I normally do is mix up some Nuun and drink that every few hours. If I get in a bad way and run completely out of water. then I will mix up a liter of ORS and down that. But that's an emergency kind of thing for me because one of the side-effects I've noticed is that ORS will make you thirsty sometimes.

Are you sure it's dehydration and not hypoglycemia?

My only real hint is it's instantly fixed with a few glasses of water. I'd expect that I'd need some glycogen change if it were hypoglycemia.

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