How Much Water Do You Need to Drink?
elemental.medium.com
elemental.medium.com
> The average adult woman should consume about 11.4 cups of fluid per day (a cup equals 8 ounces) and men should consume 15.6 [...] Subtracting the 20% of water consumed through food, that means the average woman should drink about 9.1 cups of fluid daily, and a man should drink about 12.5.
8 times 8 ounces per day of fluid is 64 ounces of fluid per day, whereas ~9 cups per day of fluid times 8 ounces/cup is ~72 ounces of fluid per day. So isn't the recommendation actually _more_ than the 8x8 adage?
Since the article got something so basic wrong (and if it was intentional you would think they would mention that the numbers were similar), I decided to stop reading the article at that point, I don't need incorrect information.
Maybe it's an editing mistake?
The actual amount of water you need varies by exertion, and diet and all sorts of things, it's not a fixed amount.
I completely agree with this statement.
>If you drink that much, you'll just pee a lot, it won't actually do anything useful.
I drink on average 6L of water a day. When I first started water-only fasting I was urinating constantly. I discovered that this was because I would drink a lot in one sitting, (as a 'meal' replica) and then interspersed throughout the day.
Once I changed my consumption style to ~150mL frequently I found that my body used the water better. Once it realized that a "constant supply" was readily available (and didn't need to worry about feast/famine cycles) I retained what I needed and more casually urinated the processed water.
My body can better manage itself when I drink 150ml 40x a day then it can manage 1L 6x a day.
You can also store water, for a short time, mixed into fiber in food that was recently eaten.
Asking in good faith, taken independently each of your comments make perfect sense to me!
Continually drinking small amounts doesn't overwhelm my stomach and therefore it feels like I urinate less, and 'retain' that water.
(24h - 8h) * 60 min/h / 40 = 24 min
So you stop what you're doing every half an hour and drink get a glass of water and drink it? Or do you have constant supply at your desk or how are the logistics?
So cold water is always close.
I also drink when I'm at home.
8 cups / day is widely reported - and suggested in the article itself - to be too high as a minimum, and yet the article actually ends up concluding that you need to be drinking more than that.
Don't consume these. They have the opposite effect of dehydrating you.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140402-are-coffee-and-tea-...
Instead what you see are obese individuals because drinking soda has the net effect of making you more thirsty, causing people to drink more soda. Which is exactly what the soda makers want you to do, and will fund studies to make you believe otherwise.
My body certainly isn't.
Of course, at any restaurant glasses given with water for the table are going to be somewhere much nearer your 236ml, so there's really nothing psychotic about it.
Bingo. It's not hard to sip on a average sized glass of water during a meal. I routinely kill a 750ml water bottle at the gym or when hiking.
Sorry but they just seem like such automatic functions I don’t see how it needs to be complicated any further.
Babies who have stomach trouble sometimes over-eat because they mistake stomach pain for hunger.
So instinct/reactions aren't failsafe. Especially when we've loaded our diet with addicting things.
Anecdotally, often my thirst is disguised as looking for something to snack on that will cause me to salivate, like chocolate.
When I make a conscious decision to have a big glass of water or two, the craving goes away.
To the point of not being able to sleep for a good part of 2018 due to severe pain, I couldn't lie down in any position or my body would ache terribly. It only got fixed after my wife asked me how much water I drink during the day, I had to think about it and my response was baffling even to me "ehr... one glass?". The sleep issues went away after a couple of days drinking more water.
If you have to get that far, are you certain to do the best job for your health?
I can only speak for myself, and find it really challenging to reliably evaluate my hungriness/thirstiness. If I can get hungry just by looking at food, or if I end up eating way too much because I've thought I was hungry (I wasn't!), then how on Earth can I possibly rely on such elusive indicators?
That's how I got really fat.
The pop science consensus has been that the human evolved for a world of food scarcity, and when confronted with an unlimited supply of food, that system breaks down. That seems pretty plausible to me, looking at global obesity rates.
In my opinion it works with food for almost all people and with fluids for many. I also drink more than enough just be drinking when I am thirsty. Some friends and also commenters here mention that their thirst doesn't work as well. So key is to know whether you can rely on your thirst.
People forget to hydrate all the time, and can ignore their thirsty signals, or even not feel thirsty...
Most people don't even understand how to listen to their own bodies anymore, and doctors are more concerned with prescriptions that treating underlying issues.
Well said! It is the sad truth that doctors can be coerced by private companies into personal monetary benefits from selling their products.
When you feel like this, you can recognize that thirst is also a likely explanation, and reach for water quickly and cheaply as a debugging step. At least rule it out before making tradeoffs to placate more expensive needs.
Drink 6 cups of coffee, a glass of OJ, and 2 glasses of water would be just fine for an adult Woman, but the “rule” convinces people they’re still falling 6 glasses short of water.
Really, unless you have a rare and diagnosed medical condition that says otherwise, drink when you are thirsty.
> Subtracting the 20% of water consumed through food
Where does this article get that number?
Edit:
Ok, it gets the number from the above link.
I still really don’t trust this article as a source of info about how much water to drink. And anyway it ends with “mostly drink when you are thirsty.”
Yep, and don't wait if you're thirsty. Learned my lesson on that one with a couple kidney stones, and never again.
"A major risk factor for kidney stones is constant low urine volume. Low urine volume may come from dehydration (loss of body fluids) from hard exercise, working or living in a hot place, or not drinking enough fluids"
https://www.urologyhealth.org/urologic-conditions/kidney-sto...
It's a really, really wide lane. If you're drinking that much water for fear of kidney stones, you may want to address your anxiety/compulsivity as well as your risk factors for kidney stones.
It gets the number from that report, which is just above your quote. The article contains a link to the report: http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2004/Dietary-Re.... Maybe the link was added later, but the article includes its source
I'd go to the toilet, notice my urine is dark from dehydration, go on with my day and then only later get thirsty.
Now that I force myself to bring a big water bottle at work and finish it before going home, I never feel thirst.
It probably depends on your body's quirks but telling people to drink only when feeling thirst and not before seems dangerous to me.
Me: "Not when you're making me carry around 40 lbs of water in canteens on my belt."
Hm, you spell 'logical' in a weird way :-)
NASA
That said yeah US units are absolutely brain-dead and confusing, how hard is it to put real units in parenthesis?
https://imageproxy.themaven.net/https%3A%2F%2Fusercontent1.h...
Absolutely false. Do you have any evidence for that statement?
"On univariate analyses, hyponatremia was associated with substantial weight gain, consumption of more than 3 liters of fluids during the race, consumption of fluids every mile"
Wooden buckets, waterskins and berries are indeed the solution. Indigenous people of the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies used buffalo intestines and stomach to make waterskins and travel the plains.
But eating raw... what numbers of fruit/veggies you need to cover the same amount of water?
Generally, drink at least enough so that you pee clear once a day, and not too dark. If it is clear all the time, you may have other issues. Also, roughly follow your thirst (unless you are drinking sweetened / salted drinks).
So the foods you eat drastically affect how much water you need. Lastly, exercise plays a big role as well.
What is a non-living food? (Given that by living here we clearly mean 'has lived'.)
The thing is, I drink a lot of water. My urine is clear/slightly yellow most of the time. I even tried drinking more water, and the dryness got worse.
Gatorade is the one thing that consistently fixes it, but it seems a vicious cycle. I’m also trying various electrolyte powders, but they don’t seem as effective.
Anyone ever had this? Unsure why “drink more” isn’t working anymore. I’m not doing any particularly vigorous exercise, just walking.
[1] https://mcb.berkeley.edu/courses/mcb135e/kidneyfluid.html
However, the most common rule is "if the color of your pee is not "clear/transparent" enough, then you should drink more water".
The "darker" your pee is, the more you should drink.
That's a symptom of overhydration. Pee should be yellow, as everybody knows.
It makes me think if you're trying to lose weight, drinking water can help.
Eg: A 200lb person should drink 100oz+ of water a day.
Misinformation. Light yellow urine does not mean you are dehydrated and crystal-clear urine is not a "hydration goal".
So what's not different for everyone? Well, if your pee is dark, then you're probably dehydrated. Ok; now we have a useful signal. It's not perfect. It doesn't capture the subtleties of the entire situation. But it's USEFUL.
Is medium becoming completely pay-to-read?
If anything, chrome is the one that's different.
chrome: incognito
firefox: private
safari: private
edge/internet explorer: inprivate
As the article is pointing out, a lot is happening when you drink water. And sipping all day means the body never gets rest from the 'water intake mode'.
So it is best to drink water until you have enough when you feel thirsty.
Edit: this was studied by Thomas D'havé, Leo Pruimboom, Tim Noakes, and others
Do you have any source for "sipping water throughout the day is not very good" and "sipping all day means the body never gets rest from the 'water intake mode'"?
I suppose next you will tell me that constantly breathing is harmful because it means that the body never gets rest from air intake mode.