Hydration this Summer!

Summer is almost here and WATER is all we need to stay hydrated and fresh! But did you know that water does more than just hydrate your body?

To start with, dehydration can in fact make you feel drained, depleted and very fatigue. Water can help your blood transport oxygen and essential nutrients your cells need. If you are getting enough water, your health also doesn’t need to work as hard to pump your blood throughout your body, thus helping your blood pressure!

If you are trying to lose weight, waters revs up your metabolism and helps you feel full. It can actually smartly replace high caloric drinks, it can be used to attenuate cocktails and drinks high caloric content, and if you drink a glass before meals, water can help you feel fuller and hence eat less! Drinking more water also helps speed up your metabolism - especially if your glass is icy cold. Your body must work to warm the water up, burning a few extra calories in the process.

Water can also help lower your stress! Because the brain is 85% water, if you are dehydrated, both your mind and body will spike with tiredness. Now if you are feeling thirsty, bad news is that you are already dehydrated because thirst is a late sign of dehydration! If you are pretty busy at work or studying, keep a small bottle or glass of water next to you and sip on it regularly.

Drinking water helps prevent muscle cramping and lubricates joints in the body. When you’re well hydrated, you can exercise longer and stronger without feeling extra soreness or experiencing spasms!

Water will also replenish your skin! Wrinkles are prone to increase with dehydration thus water in nature’s own beauty cream. Drinking water hydrates skin cells and plumps them up, making your face look younger. It also flushes out impurities and toxins, improving circulation and blood flow and leaving your face clean, clear, and glowing.

Water dilutes the salts and minerals in your urine that form the solid crystals known as kidney stones. So drinking enough water during the day can simply help you avoid kidney stones problems!

Last but not least, to adopt healthier eating habits, along with whole grains, fruits and vegetables, aka rich in fibers, you gotta drink enough water needed for good digestion! Water helps dissolve waste particles and passes them smoothly through your digestive tract.If you’re dehydrated, your body absorbs all the water, causing an increased risk of constipation!

So, are you drinking enough water?

It is best to drink 30 mL per kilogram of your weight per day! Divide them throughout your day and know that if you are exercising, feverish, living in a humid or hot weather, you might need to increase your water intake even more!

You can also have up to 3 cups (250 mL each) skimmed or low fat milk/yogurt per day, a maximum of 1 cup of freshly squeezed juice (equivalent to 2-3 whole fruits) and 3 cups of preferably unsweetened coffee or tea per day!

Info brought to you from www.webmd.com

Working Out? Hydration is a Must!

As you exercise, whether to lose weight, to be fit, to have fun or as an athlete, be alert for conditions that increase fluid loss through sweating. With more perspiration, your body dehydrates faster.

Temperature: The higher the temperature around you and the more humid it is, the greater you sweat
Intensity: As you increase intensity of your workout, this increases fluid losses
Body size: The larger your size, the more you sweat. In addition, males by nature sweat more than females

Duration: As you increase the time of your workout, this increases perspiration

Fitness: Well-fit people sweat more because they sweat at lower body temperatures. This occurs because sweating cools off your body and thus well trained athletes cool their body more efficiently than untrained individuals

Now it’s important to know that if you are a swimmer, you are just like any athlete that perspires to keep your body from overheating. However, you probably don’t notice that you are sweating because you are all surrounded by water!

Moreover, even if you are exercising in a cold environment, you sweat. It could be ice skating, skiing or even ice hokey, you need to stay hydrated especially that winter sports clothes may not allow your body to breathe efficiently.
Now, we have been talking about how important it is to stay hydrated!
But what are we going to drink to ensure proper hydration?


Water is simply a good choice to replenish the fluids that are lost. It helps you lower and normalizes your body’s elevated temperature due to exercise and moves water quickly into your tissues. Now we have heard that cold water causes stomach cramps. Well, luckily that’s just a myth. Stomach cramps may be just caused by dehydration and this is good news because statistics actually shows that athletes prefer cold water, refreshes them and enhances their performance. However, if you are performing some “cold sports” make sure to rink luke warm water to avoid hypothermia (low body temperature)

Sports Drinks can benefit athletes especially in hot and humid conditions. If you are exercising for more than one hour and your workout’s intensity in high, sports drinks are usually helpful to increase endurance.

What is important is that you make sure that your sports drink’s content of carbohydrates ranges from 6-8%; that is, 14-19 g in 240 mL). This is better than diluted juice drinks because they contain around 8 % of carbohydrates which might lead to a decrease in stomach emptying, decrease the rate of fluid absorption into your tissues, diarrhea, and cramps. Now glucose in these drinks (which is the carbohydrate), fuels you in energy and for muscle glycogen that is how glucose is stored inside your muscles. This will help prevent any depletion of this glycogen, increase your endurance capacity and aid fluid restoration.
Well, that’s not all. Sports drinks contain electrolytes as well. Usually a normal balanced diet could replenish the electrolytes you lose in your sweat and by perspiration, so if you are exercising for fun, for weight loss and just for around and hour/day, drinking water + a good diet would be great. However, if you are an athlete working out intensely, sports drinks are what you need. And don’t go for vitamin enriched drinks, that’s nothing. You don’t lose vitamins while you exercise. One more thing to pay attention to are sports drinks with caffeine. Don’t go there either. One, yes, caffeine is a stimulant but you don’t really know how it affects you during exercising and two, caffeine is considered a diuretic which means it flushes water away from your body, and I am pretty sure you don’t want that.

As for alcohol, get out of here!
- Calories from alcoholic drink do not fuel your muscles
- Alcohol is a diuretic as well
- Alcohol does not have much carbs to fuel you
- It highly impairs your coordination
- And last but not least, your liver would start working on detoxifying what you had just drunk and will not be able to provide extra glucose to help you endure your workout, leading to unpreventable fatigue!
So as you see it’s easy to know what to choose to stay hydrated while you work out, just replenish and revitalize yourself!