0 The Amount of Water I Drink

Water is the healthiest liquid for us to drink, I won't go into detail why in this post, but I have written a post relating to why: '10 Benefits of Drinking Water'. The thing is that many of us don't drink near to the amount of water we should and are actually dehydrated most of the time without really knowing. I think it's because a lot of us don't drink until we are thirsty, which sounds like common sense. However, when I did this, only drink when I felt thirsty, I wasn't drinking enough at all because I didn't feel thirsty enough to have enough to drink. I was having maybe 2 or 3 glasses of water a day which wasn't enough.


Another thing people do instead of drinking water is to substitute it for another drink, for example something like a fizzy drink, squash, juice, etc. Some of these substitutes are hydrating, not quite as much as water, but of course have flavourings and/or sugar and/or other ingredients.
For me, when I was younger squash was that water substitute. I would drink, what I considered anyway, to be a huge amount of squash each day. Thinking back to it now I still only drank 3-4 glasses a day I would say, which is still less than the recommended 2 litres of water per day. Also I liked squash to be strong, around 30-40% of the glass, and so was only getting (if you condense it) about 2 glasses of water a day. To put this into better perspective, a rough estimation of what 2 litres is is about 8 glasses a day.

When I had first started this blog I can remember writing two post about drinking water. One of those posts I mentioned at the top of this post (link provided), and the other was: '11 Tips to Drink more Water'. At this time I was going through a stage of trying to drink more water and made sure that I kept myself hydrated. I would drink the advised 2 litres of water each day and was getting into the habit of doing so.
As time went by however, and my days changed and my routines changed, my 2 litres a day water-drinking sadly went out the window, and I was back to where I was before of not keeping hydrated enough.

As of frequent, the last month, I have got back into the habit of drinking more water, and I now drink more than ever before. In fact I don't aim for the recommended 2 litres a day guideline - I aim for more and actually drink 3-5 litres every day. It sounds a bit excessive but it really isn't and I've felt so much more healthy for doing so. It's great, I've seen my skin look healthier and my liver is going to be benefiting greatly. Now that I've got back into the habit of drinking lots of water and have been doing so for now just over a month, I now rarely drink anything else and prefer it this way too.

Now going back to this rough estimation of 8 glasses of water per day, I decided to measure out the glasses in my house because I'm just that sort of person. The two most common glasses that are in our shelf are (if filled up to around 95%) 310ml. There is also a green glass in there which comes in at around 540ml, and finally my large cup which is 700ml. As I have measured these I can now keep an idea to how much water I do drink. Normally I will have 2-3 glasses of my large cup. So that is 1.4 litres-2.1 litres right there. Then on top of that I will normally have around 6-8 of the normal glasses, which is another 1,860ml-2,480ml on top. Lastly, I may have 1 or 2 glasses of the green one, which is 540ml-1,080ml. Adding all that up, the amount of water I typically drink in a day is 3,800ml-5,660ml, or 3.8 litres-5.66 litres of water per day!

I started on 02/09/13, and it's definitely a good new habit to have gotten into to that I know will benefit my health and will help my body for many years to come (I hope)
I feel that I must also mention, in case this has made any of you reading this to want to drink more water, that I drink that 3.8 litres-5.66 litres over the course of the whole day, and that drinking too much water at once is dangerous and could cause water intoxication. I will also encourage you to not enter into such events as water drinking contests as they are actually very dangerous.