Drink Your Water… Or Else! – Blog Post
You are listening to episode 4 of the Busy Mom’s Survival Guide.
Welcome to the Busy Mom’s Survival Guide where we discuss making the most of your family’s health, time and money. I’m your host PJ Jonas, and I’m here to help you make the most of each day despite your busy schedule.
Hello everyone, I hope you have enjoyed some of my first podcast episodes.
If you have been listening, you may have noticed that I’ve been talking mostly about taking care of yourself by doing things such as letting go of expectations of perfection, getting enough sleep, and eating enough fruits and vegetables.
Today I’m going to be talking about water and why it is so important to drink enough.
Emery is also going to be joining me later to talk with me as well.
You may be wondering why I really haven’t started my Survival Guide for busy moms by talking about running our homes or training our children. I’ve been doing that for a very specific reason and that is because in order for us women to handle our busy lives, we have to first take care of ourselves.
For those of you who have flown in airplanes, you know that you are always told that if there’s trouble with the oxygen levels to first put on your own mask and then put the masks on your children. There is a very important principle there and that is this – in order to take care of our loved ones we have to first take care of ourselves, you’ll never be the kind of wife or mother that you could be if you are too busy taking care of the needs of others and ignoring yourself.
You’ll end up being exhausted, sick and really not able to nurture anyone.
So it’s not being selfish if you focus some of your time and energy on yourself.
In fact it’s necessary.
Take care of yourself and you’ll have the energy to take care of your family. If you ignore yourself everyone is going to suffer.
Now I don’t mean indulge yourself meaninglessly. I’m not talking about vacations alone or over-spending your family’s budget by going shopping or anything like that. What I am talking about is proper nutrition, rest, and exercise to keep you healthy, active and full of energy.
I know that for most moms, the idea of being “full of energy” seems like an impossible dream. But it’s not, it really can be a reality.
If this is your first time listening to the podcast, my name is PJ and I understand what it feels like to be overwhelmed and exhausted because I’m definitely a busy mom. Not only am I wife and homeschooling mom of eight children, but I also have a full time job running Goat Milk Stuff. GMS is our family business where we make goat milk soap with the milk from our own dairy goats.
One of the reasons I began this podcast is because I regularly talk to women who are overwhelmed by their lives and feel like failures. And I really want to help moms to focus on taking care of themselves properly, so you can succeed in all the roles you are called to fill.
And before we start talking about water, I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who left me feedback on last week’s episode on fruits and vegetables. I was so encouraged by the number of moms who are already doing wonderful things with their children – playing games, trying new fruits and vegetables, and making salads. They are really getting their kids off to a good start. And if you haven’t started yet, just dive in because that’s what it takes to just do it.
So let’s start talking about water. As homeschool children, most of my kids at least they are supposed to be able to tell you that (but I hope they could tell you) water covers about 70% of the earth and also makes up about 70% of your body weight. This percentage varies from person to person based on factors such as age and body composition. Babies and newborns are going to have a higher percentage of water whereas elderly people are going to have less water. It’s also going to be different depending on how muscular you are. If you’re more muscular your body is going to be made up of more water. And if you have high amounts of body fat, your body is actually made up of less water.
And I’m going to admit that when I planned to do this podcast episode, I was kind of thinking that I was going to tell you – drink your eight glasses of water a day and talk about how to make sure that the water you’re drinking is healthy.
But as I started to do the research, that kind of changed.
Because I knew that drinking enough water was really important but honestly, I couldn’t have told you why. And now I can. And I was pretty amazed when I was doing the research at some of the things that I learned about water. And I’m very excited to share it with you and I hope the information is helpful to you because it turns out that not only does water make up a really large part of your body, but it’s the reason that your body is able to do what it does.
Your body is made up of so much water because water is essential to your body functioning properly.
As I mentioned before, I have 8 kids and being pregnant for so many years I always try to make sure that I drink enough water but my obsession with water and drinking enough of it didn’t actually begin until shortly after Hewitt was born and Hewitt is baby number six, so that was quite a while into being a parent. When Hewitt was 5 days old I doubled over in pain and it turned out that I had a kidney stone. I learned from that experience several things, I learned that kidney stones are awful and you don’t want to have one ever, but they are actually fairly common from pregnancy and the best way to prevent ever having them recur or having them in the first place is to drink large quantities of water and that’s the absolute best thing you can do for your kidney health and to prevent kidney stones. So after that I began to drink very copious quantities of water and I haven’t had another one, so apparently it’s working,
I am going to admit that when things get kind of crazy around here, like we just had kidding season and we didn’t get a whole lot of sleep and do much of anything else, times like that I tend to let my water intake slide, it’s something that even though I know it’s important, you just tend to kind of let it go. So that’s kind of the reason why I wanted to encourage you all to make sure that even when things get crazy you’re getting enough water because I knew about the importance of water to prevent kidney stones but until I started doing the research on this podcast I didn’t understand just how important water was.
One of the things I didn’t understand was the connection between water and high blood pressure. There are basically three factors at work when you are talking about water and high blood pressure. First, when your body doesn’t get enough water it tries to stop the loss of any water from your body, and one of the ways it does this is by constricting your capillaries and your blood vessels throughout your body. The good part of that is that it conserves the water in your body, but the bad part is that it also raises your blood pressure because smaller blood vessels mean higher pressure to get the blood flowing through it.
The second way is that we know that water is a vital part of all the cells of your body and when your body has enough water the water flows into your cells naturally through the process of reverse osmosis but if your body doesn’t have enough water then it actually needs help getting the water into your cells. One way it does this is by increasing your blood pressure which helps force the water into your cells where it needs to be.
And then the third way that water affects your blood pressure is because how much water you consume can actually affect how viscous or just how thick your blood is and it works this way because if your body needs more water to function and do its processes it can actually pull some of the water from your blood and this actually makes your blood thicker. So the thicker your blood the more pressure it requires to circulate it. I thought that was really kind of surprising, I didn’t really realize that how much water you drink had such a direct correlation to your blood pressure but it does. Those are kind of my own personal reminders for why it’s important to make sure you get enough water but there’s also some other things.
Water is very important for weight loss and maintaining a healthy weight. This is because sufficient water helps your body to metabolize your body fat and strangely enough this is also related to your kidneys. As I mentioned before, adequate water is essential to keep your kidneys functioning properly and if you don’t get enough water your kidneys don’t work at their full capacity. If they are not functioning at their full capacity, then your liver actually has to pick up some of the slack, so your liver instead of taking all your stored fat and turning it into energy for your body, it’s having to spend some of its time doing the work of your kidneys and because of that if you don’t have enough water the liver doesn’t metabolize as much fat as it could and as it should and so you end up getting excess fats stored in the body.
So if you are trying to lose weight, drinking water really is going to be an important step to helping that to happen and similarly if you’re not losing weight because you’re having trouble with retaining fluid, it may be because you’re not drinking enough water. Because if your body thinks it’s getting dehydrated, or if it actually is getting dehydrated, it stores water in between your cells. The result of that is swollen feet and legs and hands which is going to make you bloated and not feel great and make it harder for you to lose weight.
Another way water helps control your weight, or helps you to lose weight if you’re trying, is because it aids in the digestion process. This can be kind of complicated, but simply put, in order to digest your food your stomach needs to be acidic but your small intestines should be alkaline and if you don’t drink enough water your stomach doesn’t become acidic enough. It’s still slightly acidic but not enough and this causes the food first to try and back up into your esophagus which is the cause of heart burn but eventually the food works its way out of the stomach and into the small intestines but because the food wasn’t acidic enough your body doesn’t produce enough pancreatic enzymes and bile and what that does is it makes your digested food alkaline as it enters into the small intestine. So if it’s not alkaline enough, that means that the beneficial bacteria in your intestine doesn’t work optimally, so your food doesn’t properly digest and your body can’t absorb all the nutrients it should have, so because your body isn’t getting all the nutrients that it should, that sends signals to your brain that you’re hungry and you need to eat more and it’s just kind of this vicious cycle and all because you may not be getting enough water. So there’s a lot of things that are going on within your body that you don’t even realize that water is so important for.
Another thing that’s important but really not something we ever usually think about is that water helps to maintain your body temperature which is very important and it does this because it has a very large heat capacity which means that it’s going to hold its temperature pretty well if you are in a cold environment and then if you are in a hot environment you’re going to sweat and the water on your skin will evaporate and that actually cools your skin and helps to cool your body.
So the last thing that I wanted to talk about with what water does inside your body is the fact that it helps your body to remove toxins and waste both through helping the kidneys to function optimally as well as through waste removal from the cells via the blood and this is so important because not only does making sure that all those toxins get out of your body as that help your immune system which is going to prevent you from getting sick and feeling run down and all of those nasty problems but it’s going to just affect the way you feel on a day to day basis because getting all the toxins out of your body if you’re not doing that you’re going to feel more fatigued, you’re going to be more run down, you’re just not going to feel all that well.
So the bottom line and what I hope you take away from all of this is that water is so essential to your body operating the way it needs to and the bottom line is that sufficient water on a daily basis because you can’t store it up for future use you have to get it every day but sufficient water is really the cure for a lot of simple everyday problems that we deal with.
So now that we know why it’s so important to drink enough water, let’s talk about how much we actually need to drink and you’ll see recommendations all over the place from anywhere from 64 to 96 ounces per day and a good general rule of thumb is that you should get a half ounce of water per pound of body weight, so somebody who is 140 pounds should drink 70 ounces of water per day but the thing to remember is this is going to vary based on your own body. If you’re overweight, if you’re pregnant, if you exercise heavily or if you consume high quantities of fiber you’re going to need to drink even more.
So honestly the best way to tell if you are drinking enough water is to monitor your urine, your urine should be a very, very pale yellow and not dark colored at all and that’s a really good way to tell whether or not you’re drinking enough water because watching it this way also helps you to make sure that you’re consuming water throughout the day and not drinking it all at once when you remember which isn’t nearly as helpful for your body. The other thing to remember is that if you’re taking medication or vitamins, sometimes that can discolor your urine, so that will make it harder to tell that way.
Also you need to drink your water straight, it just doesn’t count if you drink it as soda or tea or coffee because those things can actually cause your body to lose water because they act as a diuretic, so it only counts if it’s straight water although the exception to that is to add lemon or lime juice to your water and we actually drink our water here with lemon. To get the most benefit, your lemon should be fresh but we keep bottled lemon juice on hand just because of the convenience factor, I don’t always have fresh lemons in the fridge so we always have that in case we need it but there is a lot of benefits to adding lemon to your water, they range from improving the taste to helping your body maintain its alkalinity to supporting your liver and even especially if you use fresh lemon juice adding some vitamins and minerals and all those benefits are great but our house our main reason for adding lemon to the water is for the taste, Jim actually grew up drinking really good water from his family home in New Hampshire, they had a well and all the other water that he ever taste kind of taste like chemicals to him, so adding the lemon makes it much more palatable to him and where he actually enjoys drinking it, so if you don’t like the taste of your water that may be a good solution for you.
And I also want to not forget to talk about making sure that your water is clean. Worldwide, dirty drinking water is a leading killer and we actually kind of saw this here at home with the tornadoes we dealt with recently and a lot of the affected areas where most of the damage was they were put on a boiled water advisory because where the houses were destroyed the pipes were left open and exposed and so those were all a source of contamination to the water supply and we actually know a family who forgot to boil their water and they ended up in the ER on IV antibiotics for an entire week and then being sent home with additional really strong antibiotics that they had to take for another month, so dirty water is really dangerous and really deadly, so we’re very fortunate because you may hear things but most tap water in our country is very safe and pretty healthy.
If you can afford it a good home water filter is always a good investment, we do have one and we use it mainly to remove the chlorine and the fluoride that are added to the public water. If you don’t have a filter on your home water supply, one of the things that you can do is pour water and let it sit for about half an hour because that’s usually enough for the chlorine to evaporate, you’re not going to get the fluoride out of it but getting the chlorine out will help and I’m not going to really spend much time talking about filters but just to say, you know, try not to use distilled water, it’s not the best for drinking and the big bulky filters are really good one and still our reverse osmosis filters, so if that’s something that you need you can start to look into those.
And I guess I need to talk a little bit about water bottles because there’s a lot of controversy on that, mostly you hear it because it’s bad for the environment but we actually avoid purchasing water bottles from the store and mainly because it’s just tap water in there, they are not putting anything special in there despite all their advertising and if the plastic bottles get too hot from like sitting in the car or too cold from being in the fridge or the freezer then there’s harmful materials in that plastic that will actually leach into your water, so I’m not dead set against plastic bottles, there’s lots of times I would drink them because it’s the only thing available and it’s much better to drink water out of a water bottle than to get dehydrated but it’s not something we do regularly, if that’s something you do you may want to look into investing in a stainless steel water bottle because those are always a much better choice, so that’s how I kind of feel about water bottles.
I did want to take a minute to answer some questions that I received.
First, Pam asked do you really need to drink 8 plus glasses of water a day. And the answer to that is it depends because first that recommendation usually refers to an 8 ounce glass of water which is actually a pretty small cup, I’m kind of thinking of the size of a child’s sippy cup, it usually holds 4-8 ounces, so most people drink glasses of water that are a lot bigger than that, the one that I drink from here at home it actually holds 24 ounces, so for me I aim to drink three of them a day. I try to do one by breakfast, one by lunch and one by dinner and that’s how I handle my water intake but you need to figure out how much water the cup that you usually use holds and go by that. So if you are 120 pounds you need approximately 60 ounces of water and if your glass holds 16 ounces then you need to aim to drink 4 of them a day, so to just say 8 plus glasses of water, no you need to get a little more specific than that.
We also had a question from Abigail who asked is flavored water healthy? And I have to start by saying that not all flavored waters are created equal. Some of them are going to be better than others and the problem of course is what they are flavored with, most of them are going to use chemical sweeteners which are terrible for you and you should definitely avoid those, others are going to add dyes and food coloring to make the color seem to be attractive and that’s also horrid for you and definitely something you should avoid. The best ones out there are going to be those that are flavored with actual fruit juice but you really need to be careful with those because of all that excess fructose and most Americans today are consuming way too much fructose. It can be very harmful to you even though fruits are generally good, too much fructose is not, so in my opinion the occasional flavored water is ok but you definitely should not rely on them to get your water intake and I don’t think it’s a good idea to let children hooked on them either which I know a lot of kids do.
And finally, Amanda wants to know how do you know when you are drinking enough and like I mentioned before, this is where it’s so important to know your body because while the recommendations are good we are each unique individuals and our needs are simply going to vary, so like I said before the best way is to monitor your urine and my children all know this and they know that if they go to the bathroom and it’s way too yellow they need to wash their hands and then come out and drink an entire glass of water.
I have to tell you we were actually in the store one day and I took Jade to the bathroom and she’s old enough, she goes into the stall by herself now and I just kind of stand out there and she’s in there and all of a sudden she yells out “oh no, mom! my tinkles are yellow!” and everybody in the bathroom started laughing and it was pretty funny but that’s something even if your kids can be aware of that in their early age, you know, tell them it’s not supposed to be dark yellow it’s supposed to be only a little bit yellow and drink more water. So the kids kind of enjoy monitoring that and that’s really what you should be doing too because it is possible to drink too much water but that is in really extreme cases and not something that any of us are probably ever going to deal with, so if you’re in doubt feel free to just drink another glass.
Amanda also wanted to know what to do if her tap water tastes bad and there’s really just three recommendations for that. First you can let it sit and see if the chlorine evaporates because it may be that your tasting what’s been bad. Second is to get a filter and try and remove anything that might be causing a bad taste and third is to just mask it with lemon juice or lime juice or something like that.
So thanks for those questions, I hope that I answered them sufficiently for you and I’ve given you quite a lot of information about water and how important it is to your body. I hope that you take that information and use it to motivate yourself to make sure that you’re providing your body with enough water for it to function optimally. Drinking enough water it’s a pretty easy solution and it’s a really cheap solution to help keep you healthy and feeling well, so I hope that you’ll take the time to do that.
Now that I’ve given you a bunch to think about, Emery has joined me and this is actually Emery’s first time on the podcast, Hi Emery.
Emery: Hi mom.
PJ Jonas: What do you think about it, do you like the fact that you’re on the podcast?
Emery: I’m a little nervous.
PJ Jonas: Because why?
Emery: I don’t like talking.
PJ Jonas: You don’t like talking? You never stop talking. What do you mean you don’t like talking?
Emery: I don’t like talking in front of people.
PJ Jonas: But you’re only in front of me.
Emery: But it’s going to be on practically television, no not television, a radio.
PJ Jonas: Yes, it is practically like being on a radio but you can’t see anybody.
Emery: No, yeah that’s true but still.
PJ Jonas: You know, you look very cute in your headphones, come on I look pretty silly too, don’t you think?
Emery: Yes.
PJ Jonas: Thanks, that makes me feel good. Alright, so I think you were eavesdropping on my podcast episode, is that true?
Emery: Yes.
PJ Jonas: So what was I talking about?
Emery: Water.
PJ Jonas: Yes. What do you think about water?
Emery: I like drinking it.
PJ Jonas: Do we drink a lot of water around here?
Emery: Yes.
PJ Jonas: Do we drink anything other than water?
Emery: Sometimes but not usually.
PJ Jonas: Pretty much just water and-
Emery: Lemon juice.
PJ Jonas: Yeah we put lemon juice in our water but what’s the other thing we drink? I’ll give you a hint, its white and we have hundreds of gallons of it.
Emery: Milk.
PJ Jonas: Yes, goat milk, it’s pretty much just those two right?
Emery: Yeah.
PJ Jonas: Do I hardly ever buy like juice or soda?
Emery: Never soda, sometimes you get juice, usually on special occasions but we usually just drink water.
PJ Jonas: Do you miss out not having other things?
Emery: Well, I mean you can always look forward to having something else because just about anything you have forever gets boring.
PJ Jonas: When we go to China Garden Buffet what do we drink?
Emery: Lemonade slash water.
PJ Jonas: You’re right we take the water and mom lets you put a little bit of a lemonade in it right?
Emery: Yeah.
PJ Jonas: And then what do we have for dessert there?
Emery: Ice cream.
PJ Jonas: Yes but ice cream and what?
Emery: Root beer.
PJ Jonas: We make root beer floats don’t we?
Emery: Yes we make root beer floats, they are delicious.
PJ Jonas: That’s about the only time you ever have soda?
Emery: Yes.
PJ Jonas: When I’m not around do you sneak soda if somebody offers it to you?
Emery: No.
PJ Jonas: Never?
Emery: I’ve done it a couple of times but…
PJ Jonas: Curious, I didn’t know if you did or not because I know you get offered it a lot, so we actually live in a location where there is a drink here called Big Red that I’d never heard of before moving to Indiana and I’ve never had because it looks really nasty. Have you tried that?
Emery: No.
PJ Jonas: Never?
Emery: Nope.
PJ Jonas: I haven’t either; it just doesn’t look very good.
Emery: No.
PJ Jonas: But everybody here swears by it and says you have to have a Big Red.
Emery: Never heard.
PJ Jonas: You never heard of that?
Emery: Nope.
PJ Jonas: When we go to parties and stuff there’s always a big bottle of it. Well it’s good to know that you haven’t even felt deprived, do you feel deprived because I make you drink water?
Emery: No.
PJ Jonas: What do you think about drinking goat milk?
Emery: It’s delicious, cow milk is disgusting, no offense.
PJ Jonas: Cow milk is disgusting?
Emery: Yes.
PJ Jonas: Why?
Emery: Raw cow milk is much better but still.
PJ Jonas: So do you think that there are kids out there who don’t like to drink water?
Emery: Yes probably.
PJ Jonas: What would you tell them?
Emery: All you have to do is get used to drinking water and it’s a lot better.
PJ Jonas: Good, you want to tell us about the alarm clock that you’ve made for yourself if you need to get up at a certain time in the morning?
Emery: Sure, well mainly, it doesn’t necessarily wake me up, I can’t pick when I’m going to wake up, it simply wakes me up not past 8 o’clock, so all I do is drink as much as I can possibly fit in my stomach and I go to bed, I do it right before bed and every morning you can count on it.
PJ Jonas: Your bladder wakes you up?
Emery: Yes.
PJ Jonas: So who needs an alarm clock, you just need water and a bladder.
Emery: Yes.
PJ Jonas: Alright, well thanks for joining me.
Emery: You’re welcome.
PJ Jonas: I’m glad you’re here.
Emery: Yup, same here.
PJ Jonas: You want to help me pick the winner for the Goat Milk Stuff gift certificate?
Emery: Sure why not.
PJ Jonas: Alright, I need you to pick a number between 1 and 37.
Emery: Alright, I’ll pick 7.
PJ Jonas: Ok. The winner of this week’s $10 Goat Milk Stuff certificate is Sadie B. Congratulations Sadie and all you need to do is send me an email at soap@goatmilkstuff.com and we’ll be sure to get you your gift certificate. So thanks for the help Emery.
Emery: You’re welcome.
PJ Jonas: And I appreciate you coming even though you were a little nervous, was it as bad as you thought it would be?
Emery: No.
PJ Jonas: That’s good.
We’re almost done with this podcast episode and I want to leave you with this week’s survival guide rule and that is to drink enough water. Simply put, you need it. You need enough water to flush the toxins out of your body so you feel good. You need enough water to maintain a healthy weight or to lose weight. You need enough water to keep your kidneys healthy and your blood pressure down and drinking water is just important but just like eating enough fruits and vegetables in order to make the change, you need to start tracking it, you can either write it down on a piece of paper how many glasses you’ve had. Or one thing I’ve done in the past is to pour how much I need to drink into a pitcher and just know that by the end of the day I need to finish drinking the entire pitcher, that also works. On a side note you usually want to be done drinking at least an hour before bed time if not two hours so you’re not up all night going to the bathroom because our bladders aren’t always as healthy as Emery’s are. But either way make sure to drink your water because as busy women in order to get everything done we need to be operating at our peak performance. We need to consume it and it’s hard to be your best if you’re not taking care of yourself, so don’t forget to get enough sleep, eat your fruits and veggies and drink your water.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Busy Mom’s Survival Guide, I hope that you have enjoyed listening and that you’ve learned something that will motivate you to consume enough healthy water. Join me on the next episode were I’ll be talking about how to manage exercise as a busy mom. If you’ve enjoyed this episode please leave me a comment on the blog post at www.pjjonas.com or rate it on iTunes. You can also call my feedback line at (240) 230-SOAP. Until next time, I’m PJ Jonas and I’m praying that you take care of yourself despite your busy life.