Focus:
Trusting the signals our own bodies give us.
Repetition:
My body speaks to me and I am learning to listen.
Thirst, hunger, rest, and rhythm are gifts.
I trust the wisdom God built into me.
True Hydration: Drinking to Thirst
As we round up the last of ARP, I want us to keep our attention on hydration. This is one of those areas where the advice of the modern world has led us astray, and where the modern world itself is working against us.
We have all heard that we should drink eight glasses of water a day, that we should carry a jug with us everywhere, and that we should drink before we are thirsty because thirst means we are already dehydrated. None of that came from our bodies.
Tim Noakes and Waterlogged
If you want to read one book on this, read Waterlogged by Tim Noakes. Dr. Noakes is an emeritus professor of exercise science and sports medicine at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and he has spent decades studying what happens to the body during endurance exercise. He is also the researcher who first sounded the alarm about the dangers of drinking too much fluid.
His book, published in 2012, is titled “Waterlogged: The Serious Problem of Overhydration in Endurance Sports,” and it is worth your time even if you never run a race in your life. What he found is that the advice to drink as much as possible, and to drink ahead of thirst, was never based on human physiology. It grew up alongside the sports drink industry, and it was promoted and protected by the companies that profited from it.
Meanwhile, runners were being harmed, and some were dying, not from dehydration but from drinking too much water. This condition is called exercise-associated hyponatremia, which simply means the sodium in the blood has been diluted to dangerous levels. When sodium drops, water moves into the cells, the brain swells, and the body cannot cope.
Dr. Noakes’ conclusion, after all of that research, is beautifully simple. Drink to thirst. He later went on to write about low-carbohydrate, high-fat eating after his own diagnosis of type two diabetes, so he is a man who has been willing to change his mind when the evidence and his own body told him to.
Your Thirst Is Not Broken
God built an exquisite system into your body for managing water. Your blood is constantly monitored for its concentration, and when it becomes even slightly too concentrated, you feel thirsty. Your kidneys hold on to water when you need it and release it when you have too much. Your hormones adjust all day long without you thinking about it.
Thirst is not a malfunction or a warning that you have failed. Thirst is the system working. When we override thirst and pour in water all day long, we are telling a very wise system that we do not trust it.
Why Drinking Lots of Water Is a Problem
Water without minerals does not hydrate us well; it dilutes us. Every glass of plain water we drink beyond our thirst pulls sodium, potassium, and magnesium out through the kidneys. Those are the very minerals we have spent two years rebuilding.
Drinking large amounts also means running to the bathroom all day and waking at night, which costs us the deep sleep our healing depends on. Drinking a lot of water with meals dilutes our stomach acid, which we need for digesting protein, absorbing minerals, and keeping pathogens out. Filling up on water can also blunt our appetite so that we eat less of the nutrient-dense food our bodies are asking for.
Signs that we are overdoing it include urine that is completely clear like water, frequent urination, puffiness in the face and fingers, headaches, nausea, lightheadedness, and a strange flat or foggy feeling.
What True Hydration Actually Is
Hydration is not how much water we pour in. Hydration is how much water our cells are able to hold. Water gets inside the cell and stays there because of minerals, and it is held in our tissues by healthy fascia and collagen. This is why a person can drink a gallon of water a day and still have dry skin, dry eyes, a dry mouth, constipation, and cramps. The water went straight through.
True hydration is water plus minerals plus a body that can hold them.
Here is how we hydrate in ARP.
- Drink to thirst, and drink slowly, sipping rather than gulping.
- Salt your food generously with a good mineral-rich salt.
- Drink meat stock every day, which gives you water, minerals, and collagen all together.
- Use the brine from your ferments, a spoonful at a time.
- Drink your fermented dairy if you tolerate it, as it carries water, minerals, and microbes.
- Eat the water-rich foods that come with their minerals attached, like cucumbers, squashes, berries, and cooked greens.
- Choose spring water or mineral water when you can, and if you drink reverse osmosis or heavily filtered water, add minerals back with a pinch of salt.
- Move your body and breathe through your nose, because water follows movement and breath into the tissues.
Hydration on a Fat-Based Diet Versus a High-Carbohydrate Diet
This part surprises people. Our hydration needs are genuinely different depending on how we eat.
When we eat a lot of carbohydrate, we store it as glycogen, and glycogen holds a great deal of water with it, roughly three grams of water for every gram of glycogen. Insulin is also high on a carbohydrate-rich diet, and insulin tells the kidneys to hold on to sodium and water. So a person eating a high-carbohydrate diet is carrying extra water and extra sodium in the body all the time.
When we shift to a fat-based, lower-carbohydrate way of eating, as many of us do on this protocol, the opposite happens. We burn through that stored glycogen and release the water it was holding. Insulin comes down, and the kidneys begin to let go of sodium and water instead of holding them. This is why people often lose several pounds in the first week of eating this way, and it is water, not fat.
It is also why people feel awful in that first week or two, with headaches, fatigue, dizziness, muscle cramps, constipation, and heart palpitations. That is not the fat making them sick. That is minerals going out the door. The answer is not to drink more water, which only dilutes what is left. The answer is more salt, more meat stock, more magnesium, and more potassium-rich food.
If you are eating a fat-based diet, you will likely need noticeably more salt and minerals than your neighbour who eats bread and potatoes, and you will probably need less plain water. Trust your thirst and trust your salt cravings, because both are your body asking for what it needs.
The Modern World Is Dehydrating
Even when we are drinking well, modern life works against our hydration.
A dysregulated nervous system is dehydrating, because when we live in fight or flight, blood is shunted away from digestion, we absorb less of what we drink, and stress hormones flush minerals out through the kidneys. Technology dehydrates us, because we sit for hours in front of screens, breathing shallowly through our mouths, forgetting to blink, forgetting to drink, and staying wired long into the night. Spending too much time indoors dehydrates us, as heating and air conditioning pull moisture out of the air and out of us, and we miss the sunlight and contact with the earth that our bodies use to organise water in our tissues.
The higher demands of modern living dehydrate us, with rushing, skipping meals, eating on the run, long commutes, and never enough rest. Modern food dehydrates us, because processed food arrives stripped of minerals and asks the body to spend minerals digesting it. Modern water dehydrates us, because so much of it is filtered until there is nothing left in it but water. Coffee, black tea, and alcohol pull water and minerals out faster than they put them in. Air travel, hot showers, mouth breathing, and snoring at night all quietly cost us water too.
None of this is a reason to panic. It is simply a reason to keep hydration as one of our lifelong practices, right alongside our food, our movement, and our nervous system work.
This Week
- Put the giant water jug away for a week and drink only when you are thirsty.
- Notice how much you actually want, and write it in your journal.
- Salt your food well and drink meat stock daily.
- Watch the colour of your urine and aim for a pale straw yellow rather than completely clear.
- Notice your mouth, your skin, your energy, your sleep, and your bathroom trips.
- Ask your body what it wants rather than asking the internet.
Living Water
“Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.” (John 4:14)
There is a thirst in us that no glass of water will ever satisfy, and it is worth remembering that as we tend to the body.
Care for your body’s thirst with wisdom, and let your soul’s thirst lead you to the One who made both.