Water, water, everywhere!

My thoughts about water.

Very deep.

Really. 😉

Okay, so you may recall that one of my summer goals is to drink more water. Specifically a gallon a day. Yup. I want to it with a rather grim determination to “choke” down a gallon of water that first day. See, for some strange reason I go through seasons… sometimes lasting a very long time, where I just don’t “like” water. Apparently this is actually a common phenomenon, especially among women. Anyway, I just knew that having to drink that much was going to be difficult.

Cue first day on a gallon:

I was shocked to discover that first day that it actually wasn’t hard to drink that much water. Especially if when I went to get a drink I drank a BUNCH quickly instead of trying to sip it all day. Drinking before, during and after meals helped as well. I didn’t think I was quite going to make it through the whole gallon that day, but I did, and I noticed a couple very interesting side effects. (besides the obvious)

First, I was SOOOOOO thirsty all day! Imagine that! I felt as if I simply couldn’t get enough water. Surprising, since I’m sure I had been drinking no where close to that much water at all in the preceding days, weeks, months…. year? Weird. The other thing I noticed especially that first day was that I was much less hungry all day. Perhaps my tummy was just trying to deal with the flood and therefor couldn’t send any “food” signals to my brain, but either way I thought it was a good thing. 🙂 The third thing, which may be unwater related, but that I did notice the first few days of my gallon consumption was a very sharp headache in the late afternoon. I wrestle with headaches on a regular basis, so it COULD be completely unrelated, but for some reason I was associating them together. Maybe it was the detox of having extra fluid cleaning things out or something that caused it, but it was interesting anyway. If a headache can be interesting. 😉

I haven’t been tracking my water intake as strictly as I did the first few days, and we did have some travel time last week which always kills it for me. But since then I know I’ve been drinking at least 3 quarts a day. I have a big Sigg bottle that is one quart, and that’s how I gage my intake. I’m going to ramp it up again this week and get back to the (self) prescribed 4 quarts. I can’t believe how not hard it is compared to what I was expecting. Water, and plenty of it, has great benefits, and I’m glad that I took this step to get more of it in my daily routine.