Water, Water

Through a desire to change my actions and with the encouragement of both my girlfriend and my boss, I began a program of drinking one standard (.5 L or 16 oz) bottle of water each day.

To many people, this does not sound hard. But I hate the taste of water (yes, there IS a taste to water) and I prefer just about anything else to drink (excluding coffee and tea—I dislike both of those beverages).

At first, I was barely finishing the bottle. Most days I would have to gulp down the last few inches in the container before leaving work or take it with me and finish it at home. During this time I came to realize I dislike drinking cold water except in specific instances. So I got smarter and started leaving the bottles out of the refrigerator.

In an online article proclaiming how to drink more water in a day, the author suggested leaving an open bottle of water at your PC. In this way, she wrote, you would be more likely to grab that and take a sip than to stand up and go hunting for a soda machine or wander over to the coffee maker. So I started doing that, too. The key is to make it more accessible than whatever else you may want.

I am now getting to the point where I am finishing the bottle before lunch, and even earlier some days. On occasion, I am even refilling and finishing a second helping.

Perusing the internet for water facts, there seems to be little consensus on how much water a person “should” drink each day. Some people recommend 32 oz a day (4x8) while many advocate 64 oz (8x8). I’ve seen anecdotal evidence that you should drink half your body weight in ounces of water a day as a rough estimate. Others admit that you can drink too much water, getting to the point where additional water does you no good and some even suggest you can reach the point of water poisoning if you drink “too much.”

The other thing to consider is that everything you eat and drink contains some water. I’ve seen some nifty conversions to allow you to count the “typical” beverages one might imbibe during the day. One suggested that you can only count half the volume of a beverage with caffeine as part of your water intake. Another discounted entirely all caffeinated drinks. For sugary beverages, the results were even more wildly askew—I just want a drink, I’m not going to do complex mathematics to figure out how much a beverage adds or subtracts from my water intake! So I threw those suggestions aside.

I drink a lot of beverages during the day. I like drinking more than eating. With as wildly varying as is the information I see online regarding water intake, I have decided to take a middle-ground tactic and do whatever feels right to me.

Currently, my plan is to replace the “during the work day” sodas I typically drink with the one bottle of water. I will try to increase that to two bottles of water during the day if I seem to hold true to this current kick and can make it a habit. I will drink whatever I want with lunch and dinner. I will continue drinking milk and fruit juices as I see fit in addition. I figure that all of this will combine to get me fairly close to the 64-80 oz of water per day that seems to be recommended.

Today as I write this I am just finishing my second bottle of water. That makes twice this week I’ve managed to finish more than my goal.