The Importance of Good Water

Although most people don’t think of it as a nutrient, water is a most vital nutrient in your daily diet. Think of it this way. You can go for weeks without food but you can only go for a few days without water. It’s very important. It’s even more important when you realize that your body’s composition is 60 to 75% water. So roughly two thirds of our body weight is water. You can break them down even better by looking at the composition of different body parts. Your blood is 83% water; your muscles are about 75% water; your bones are about 23% water; and your brain is 74% water. You can see why it’s really necessary to drink good water.

It doesn’t take much dehydration at all to cause problems in your body. You can have as little as 1 or 2% loss of body weight in water and the reaction can be that your energy is sapped and you feel tired.

Not getting enough water can cause other problems such as mild to excessive thirst, fatigue (which we just covered), headaches, dry mouth, muscle weakness, dizziness, lightheadedness, and little or no urination. It’s important to make sure that you drink enough water.

A lot of people have asked ‘How much water is enough water?’ The basic rule of thumb is to take in about half your body weight converted into fluid ounces. So if a person weighs 200 lbs., they should be drinking 100 fluid ounces of water per day.

About 20% of your daily water intake can come from food. If you eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, there’s going to be a lot of water in them. This is particularly true in things like watermelon and citrus fruit are almost 100% water when you figure it out by weight. Beverages like milk and juice are primarily water too.

A lot of people ask me ‘What about beer, wine, coffee, tea, and soft drinks? Can these drinks be figured into your water intake?’ unfortunately, these drinks are all diuretics and will actually leach the water out of your system. Water is still your best bet.

Now that I’ve given you some of the downside of not drinking enough water, here are some of the benefits. Water works in every system of the body. It aids your digestion; it helps you absorb all your foods; it acts as the transport system for all the nutrients in the bloodstream. Water is necessary for all functions particularly circulation and excretion. For example, you actually blow off water in your breath each time you exhale. Water leaves your system not just to your urine but also through your feces, your sweat, and through respiration. You lose water daily so it’s extremely important to keep putting the water back in.

Water helps you to maintain your body temperature; it does this through the process of sweating and by the opening up of the capillaries in the circulatory system allowing the skin surface to have the proper blood flow that helps to regulate the body temperature.

One of the biggest things the water does is cleansing. Water helps flush the toxins out of your system. It helps keep your kidneys healthy; helps keep your bladder healthy; it gives you better skin because it helps flush out the waste including dead skin cells.

Drinking enough water gives you a decreased chance of kidney stones or urinary tract infections. It can give you more energy because dehydration is one of the biggest causes of fatigue. Not drinking enough water drops your blood volume which makes the heart work harder and you just get more tired, more quickly.

Another thing the water does is revving up your metabolism. There was a study recently published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism from a research center in Berlin. It showed that people who consume two liters of water a day can burn up to an extra 150 calories per day. I know that doesn’t seem like much but that converts into about 5 lbs. per year of weight loss that you don’t even have to worry about because it’s being burned off by simply drinking more water.

It was also discovered during the study that when a person drank water their metabolic rate went up within 10 minutes. The researchers think that about 40% of the raised metabolic rate had to do with the fact that the body was warming up the water that the person had drank. That’s one good reason to drink water that’s cold. Another good reason for drinking cold water is that it enters your system more rapidly than warm water.

Water also helps suppress your appetite. It helps keep you feeling more full while it helps the body metabolize stored fat. According to studies, if you decrease your water intake, you can actually cause more fat to be deposited. Likewise, if you increase your water intake, you will decrease your existing fat deposits.

Here’s the reason it works that way. Your kidneys can’t work properly if you don’t give the body of water. When the kidneys don’t work properly, some of the load that is usually done by the kidneys gets put off on the liver. The liver’s biggest function is to metabolize the stored fat and to convert that stored fat into usable energy for your body.

If the liver has to do some of the kidneys’ job, it obviously will not be able to work at full capacity. What ends up happening? The liver can’t metabolize as much fat so more fat ends up getting stored in your body.

Because water is so vital in metabolizing fat, it’s a key factor in losing weight. Weight loss is increased by the revved up metabolism supplied by drinking enough water. With this in mind, an overweight person actually needs to drink more water than a thin person. That’s because the more you weigh, the higher your metabolic load is.

Since we know the water does help metabolize the fat and that an overweight person as more fat metabolize, it’s easy to see that overweight person needs to drink more water. In fact, they should drink one extra glass of water for every 25 lbs. of extra weight that they’re carrying.

Water also helps maintain your muscle tone. Since the muscles are over 75% water, it helps give the muscles the ability to contract, prevents dehydration within the muscles, and prevents the soreness.

It also helps prevent sagging skin. This happens because as water is flushing out the toxins, the shrinking cells are actually buoyed up by the water giving it a clean, healthy cell structure. It does this by clearing out all the toxins in the cells.

Water is a universal solvent; water is a cleanser that we use all the time for cleaning our dishes, cleaning our clothes, and cleaning our cars. It does make sense that we should use it to clean our bodies as well.

During weight loss, if you’re working on that, your body will be dumping a whole lot of toxic waste into your system as it burns off the stored fat. You’ll need to drink more water to help flush out all those toxins and to prevent you from feeling anything uncomfortable from the detoxification. Water helps get rid of the waste and flushes it out fast.

Speaking of getting rid of waste, water also helps relieve constipation. When the body doesn’t get enough water, the first place it goes to get water is the lower intestines. What happens then is that you become constipated due to lack of water. If the same person drinks enough water, the bowel movements return.

Since we are talking about excretions and eliminating waste, a good way to tell if you’re drinking enough water is the color of your urine. If it’s a dark orangey color or like the color of apple juice, you’re not drinking enough water. The color of your urine should be more like lemonade. If your urine is clear like water, that’s even better. That way, you know that you are fully hydrated.

When you finally get to the point where you are fully hydrated, all of your systems are going to work better. There won’t be any fluid retention because your body only retains fluid when it thinks that it is running short on fluid. So when you get enough water, the fluid retention will stop, your stored fat cells will be used as fuel, the liver will be freed up to do the work that it is supposed to be doing, there won’t be as much stress placed on your kidneys, your regular thirst will return, and there won’t be as much hunger.

Some people have asked about sources of water other than fruits and vegetables. Tap Water is not all that good to drink. A study done by Tufts University on tap water in different parts of United States showed contamination ranging from E. coli to pharmacy drugs. That’s not unusual when you think that roughly 80% of all medications that people take is eliminated in their urine or feces. Currently, there are no wastewater treatment facilities that have pharmaceutical screens to filter out and clean the water before sending it back out into the community for use. The biggest concentration of a drug was found to be the cholesterol reducing drugs like Lipitor. The second largest concentration was hormone replacement drugs like Premarin and birth-control pills. All of these things can be found in your tapwater. It’s best to get your own filters for your home. There are several different types of water filters available including reverse osmosis and charcoal filtering.

Bottled water is another way to go. Try to stay away from plastic bottles because of the plastic can leach into the water over time. Bottled waters will have an expiration date. This is done to reduce the risk of any plastic being in the water if it were stored for a long period of time or in a heated environment. The plastic contains neurotoxins that can attack the nervous system and reproductive system. Try to get your water in glass if possible.

Alkaline water is the best of all for you. It’s important that the body be kept at a more alkaline ph because studies have shown that the more acidic a body is, the more prone it is to disease, particularly cancer. Try to keep your body’s pH at 7. This can be measured by your urine; it should also have a 7 pH which will be that very clear color that I spoke about earlier. By the way, the pH of water is 7.

The majority of people the United States have acidic bodies directly caused by their high consumption of meat and generally poor diets that contain foods that will cause the body to be acidic. For example, soft drinks contain phosphoric acid which will cause the body to become acidic.

To sum it up, drink plenty of water and try to get it in a glass container.

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Alkalize for Good Health

You can keep your body clean by flushing out toxins and waste. This process is called detoxification, and one of the best ways to accomplish a water detox is by drinking plenty of clean alkaline water.

The food that we eat burns with oxygen in our cells to produce energy. After burning, the ash becomes acid wastes and the cells dump them into the bloodstream. If you could get rid of 99.9% of the garbage in your home everyday, wouldn’t that 0.1% accumulate into a lot of garbage over the years?

That same analogy is true as our body tries its best to get rid of these wastes through urine, breath and perspiration. Unfortunately, we cannot get rid of all the wastes that we produce and what is left over must be stored somewhere in our body. The body plays a clever trick to convert these acid wastes into solid wastes, which is the beginning of ‘Acidosis’, a state that the body becomes slightly acidic rather than alkaline. Read on to learn how this acid build up affects most adult degenerative diseases.

Acidity and Weight

The body begins to store these solid wastes in many places, around the organs and under the skin as fat. Many believe that fat production may be a result of acid waste demands for a storage medium. Fewer toxins in your body will require less space for storage, hence reducing the waist size.

Acidity and Aging

Examples of solidified acidic wastes in our body are cholesterol, fatty acid, uric acid, kidney stones, urates, sulfates and phosphates. The accumulation of these non-disposed solid wastes is the process of aging. Cholesterol and fatty acids are the result of eating too much pasta and bread and not exercising enough. Uric acid and ammonia come from all kinds of meat. Phosphoric acid comes from grains such as rice and drinks such as cola, Sulphuric acid comes from egg yolks. In Western nations, antacids are a billion dollar business because so many people think the problem is an over acidic stomach, when in fact it is an over acidic body.

Acidity and Osteoporosis

Sulfuric and phosphoric acid are both poisonous acids. They must have alkaline minerals to neutralize them in order to become benign. In the absence of enough alkaline minerals from our diet, the body has no choice but to rob calcium and phosphorous from our body minerals to convert these poisonous acids into non-poisonous acid salts; sulfate, phosphates, and urates. Most of our calcium and phosphorous stores are in our bones

Acidity and Diabetes

Depending upon where the body stores acid wastes, blood circulation around that area gets poor and eventually a vital organ is unable to receive enough blood supply and becomes dysfunctional. Many adult degenerative diseases are the result of poor circulation. Diabetes is an adult degenerative disease which is caused by acid accumulation around the pancreas.

Acidity and Cancer

Malignant cancer cells are acidic, while healthy cells are alkaline. Normal cells cannot survive near areas of waste acid accumulation. Mutation of healthy alkaline cells into acidic cells that thrive in an acidic environment is the beginning of cancerous growths. Experienced oncologists increase the alkalinity of their patients before administering treatment, often by injecting sodium bicarbonate, an alkaline buffer.

Acidity and Heart Disease

Acidic wastes accumulate outside and inside the blood vessels. Waste particles inside the blood vessels can be very dangerous, leading to clogging of capillaries servicing critical sections of the brain. Our body attempts to paste these waste particles onto artery walls to prevent them from floating around and creating terminal damage. This pasting action eventually leads to excess flow restriction and potential heart attacks.

Alkaline Neutralizes Acid

The scientific truth that alkaline neutralizes acid is a basic natural phenomenon that requires no ‘double blind testing’. Alkaline water has no nutritional or medicinal value to cure disease; all it does is neutralize the acidic wastes in the human body and liquefy them for elimination by the kidneys. It is recommended to drink 8 glasses of alkaline water daily to detoxify and maintain good health.

Depending on the individual, we all store acidic wastes differently. Disease symptoms manifest depending upon where the wastes accumulate. For this reason, drinking alkaline water gives different results for different people. Some people lose weight, some are relieved of gout, some lower blood pressure, and some reverse other long-term conditions. When we understand the fact that all adult degenerative diseases are caused by the accumulation of acidic wastes, it is no mystery that drinking alkaline water improves our health.

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Drinking quality water is maybe a not so forgotten healthsecret to staying and looking younger. Water detoxification is part of that reason.

The Secret To Staying Young With Water

Dry skin is one of the signs of an aging body. Drinking plenty of water is the secret to staying young and is imperative for someone who wants to slow down the signs of aging such as dry skin. Most doctors recommend that we drink at least 8 glasses of water each day.

Water cleanses our body. It promotes the efficiency of blood circulation to help expel the toxins out of the body. Water aids the body in swilling out waste from particular cells, keeping them in good state. While it carries away toxins from the skin, water also transports necessary vitamins and minerals into individual cells.

Water comprises 70% of our body. Skin, being the largest organ, has a lot of water in it. Because of this, our skin needs regular re-hydration. The most powerful moisturizers are not enough to take the place of the element that comprises our body most. Not enough re-hydration causes the skin to look dry, tough, and old.

As we get older, if we are not flushing out all the generated wastes by drinking water, we allow these toxins and impurities to mount up within our body. For our body to operate and to maintain temperature, we consume nutrients inside our cells. The chief ingredients of all foods, real or junk, plant or animal, alkaline or acid, costly or not, are proteins, fats or carbohydrates. And these are nothing but the amalgamations of these elements: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen.

After undergoing the digestive and circulatory processes, these nutrients will be oxidized in the cellular level. After this, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen will all turn into organic acids: fatty acids, ammonia, uric acids, etc.

These acidic rubbishes are expelled in the form of urine or sweat after having undergone some processes in the blood. Regrettably, as a result of our lifestyles (i.e., too much stress, not getting enough sleep, not enough workout, too much ingestion, smoking, etc.), the body can’t rinse out all those acidic wastes produced in our body. These waste products build up in an area in our body. What’s worse is that we don’t consume enough fruits and vegetables which are alkaline foods. We get old by this process.

To reverse aging caused by acidic waste products, we should drink alkaline water. Acid free alkaline water or micro water is created by cleaning a tap water (typically with a pH of 7), and letting it go through an electro analysis chamber. Alkaline and acid minerals found in a tap water is split b a device called water ionizer. The system would release water with a pH of 9 (alkaline) and another set with a pH of 5 (acidic).

Drinking alkaline water is one of the most helpful and trouble-free ways to flush toxins and delay the process of aging. It effectively lies in the fact that it penetrates deeper than ordinary water. There, it dissolves and transports wastes out of the body.

Alkaline water is more than twice as effective as ordinary tap water. In fact, the effects of three glasses of alkaline water, is considered greater than six glasses of regular water. With alkaline water, 4 glasses is enough to suffice your daily water need, and delay aging.

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Alan Nelson is editor and publisher of the Staying Young website. To learn more about Staying Young, visit: www.alanmnelson.com/staying-young/

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Hydration, or drinking enough water, is higly relevant to a heathy diet and any diet that suggests fast water weight loss. This article makes points about clean, filtered, pure alkaline water.

Why Water is Vital to Weight Loss

During weight loss, the body has a lot of waste to get rid of. Adequate water meaning filtered water helps flush out the waste.The quality of water is important for the body. Purified water, alkaline water, filtered water are far more healthier than tap or bottled water.

During weight loss, the body has a lot of waste to get rid off-all that metabolized fat must be shed. Again, adequate purified water helps flush out the waste. Purified water can help get rid of constipation. When the body gets too little water, it siphons what it needs from internal sources. The colon is a primary source. Results? Constipation. But, when a person drinks enough water, normal bowel function usually returns. So far, we’ve discovered some remarkable truths about water and weight loss:

The body will not function properly without enough water and cannot metabolize stored fat efficiently.

Retained water shows up as excess weight.

To get rid of excess water, you must drink more water.

Drinking water is essential to weight loss.

Considering the health risks of Tap water and Bottled Water, it is better to use filtered water.

HOW MUCH WATER IS ENOUGH

On the average, a person should drink eight (8) ounce glasses every day. That’s about 2 quarts. However, the overweight person needs one additional glass for every 25 pounds of excess weight.

The amount you drink also should be increased if you exercise briskly or if water is hot and dry.

Water should preferably be cold…It is adsorbed into the system more quickly than warm water. And some evidence suggests that drinking cold water can actually help burn calories.

To utilize water most efficiently during weight loss, follow this schedule:

Morning: 1 quart consumed over 30-minute period.

Noon: 1 quart consumed over a 30-minute period.

Evening: 1 quart consumed between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m.

When the body gets the water it needs to function optimally- its fluids are perfectly balanced. When this happens, you have reached the "breakthrough point." What does this mean?

Endocrine-gland function improves.

Fluid retention is alleviated as stored water is lost.

More fat is used as fuel because the liver is free to metabolize stored fat.

There is loss of hunger almost overnight.

If you stop drinking enough water, your body fluids will be thrown out of balance again, and you may experienced fluid retention, unexplained weight gain and loss of thirst. To remedy the situation you will have to go back and force another "breakthrough." Get first a good weight loss program and don’t forget the importance of water. Take action and starts living a healthier and longer life.

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