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health & wellness
PJ GLASSEY believes eight isn't enough Cracking Your Thirst Code We have heard a lot lately from hydration naysayers who claim we really don't need all the water we drink. In fact, they claim we don't even need the traditional recommendation of eight glasses per day.  I feel they are quite mistaken. Proper hydration is not only the single most important ingredient in any fitness and fat loss program, but it is also vital for good health.
In my opinion, eight glasses per day is actually not enough for most people. So far all the "experts" I have seen who has claimed that we don't need eight or more glasses of water per day have a little fat to lose themselves; every layperson who has repeated this message to me has also been at least moderately overweight. Things that make you go "hmmmmm..."
Our brains are 85 percent water, so it figures that only the dehydrated people are preaching the less-water message in spite of all the evidence available for proper hydration. Even if there were no scientific proof for proper hydration, it would still make for basic common sense; so I guess us smart, hydrated folks have to "dumb it down" for the dehydrated population to understand.
The bottom line is that even if you doubt what I am saying here, the risk of getting too little water is much worse than the risk of getting a little too much. If I'm wrong, you are only making more trips the bathroom. If I'm right, your whole life changes, and I've seen that happen over and over.
If you want to know how much water your body uses in a day, just weigh yourself right before bed, and then again right when you wake up. You will be one to two pounds lighter in the morning, simply from exhaling water vapor while you slept!
This means that if you stayed asleep for 24 hours, you would breathe out 48 to 96 ounces of water in that time. This equates to 6-12 glasses of water right there. Now add normal daily activities, and you are already over the traditional eight-glass recommendation, even before sweat from exercise or a hot day is factored in.
Our thirst mechanisms do not work right when we are chronically dehydrated. Our bodies are forced to pull water out of our food, and this teaches our system to tell us we are hungry when we are really just thirsty! We then eat more food, when we really just need more water. Since water has zero calories and food always has calories, you can see the obvious benefits of this little swap.
If you don't believe this hunger/thirst phenomenon, try drinking your proper amount of water for three weeks, and you will see for yourself that you get thirsty more often than you get hungry instead of vice versa. This is because when you are properly hydrated, and your body is getting its needs met from water instead of extracting it from food, it just asks for more water! Many people have lost fat from proper hydration alone, because their food consumption goes down so much after their thirst mechanism gets dialed in properly.
The only way you can depend on your thirst mechanism to accurately tell you when you need water (and not more food) is to be properly hydrated. To calculate your water needs, divide your body weight in half and then drink that many ounces of water each day. Some people under 100 pounds might need more, and others over 250 pounds might need less, but it's a good general rule.
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