Drinking Water and Weight Loss

Water is important, but a lot of people don’t know just how important it is.

Not drinking enough water can affect your kidneys’ ability to function properly and is even the leading cause of kidney stones. Drinking plenty of water is one of the easiest ways to avoid UTIs (urinary tract infections) as it flushes the bad bacteria from your bladder and kidneys. [1]

As well, being dehydrated can lower the water content in your blood, causing increased blood pressure, and your skin can become more vulnerable to skin disorders and aging.

These are just some of the things that can happen when you’re not drinking enough water.

In regards to weight loss, water is a great assistant! It will make you burn more calories! Calories burned at rest will increase 24-30% within 10 minutes of drinking 500mL of water, and remain at that level for an hour. [2]

Drinking water before meals can reduce your appetite, decreasing the risk of over eating, and it prevents you from drinking other, sugary drinks.

 

So how much should you be drinking? “They” (there’s no actual universally agreed upon amount, but this is what most sites suggest) say that women should be drinking 2L and men 3L as a minimum for the body to function properly. This means that if you want it to really aid your weight loss, you need to up that figure, let’s say by 500mL to 1L. This needs to be EVEN MORE if you’re exercising as your body loses water to sweating.

Some people may look at those numbers and think “no problem”, others will think about how they go through most days drinking nothing by tea, coffee, and soft drink (I know that I’ve had many of those days in the past). Either way, whatever you’re thinking as you’re reading this, if you’re not used to drinking this much water, it’s harder than you think.

 

So there’s a few tricks you can use to help you get all of your water in!

• Download a water tracking app. You can set your goals, track your water, and it will give you a reminder to drink more when you’re starting to fall behind.
• Get a massive water bottle (like my 2L one). You’ll know that you need to drink at least 1 to 1 and a half of these, and since it’s already measured, you won’t need to track you water
• Get a big water bottle, and make marks with times that you have to have drank that amount of water by.

If you start to get bored of plain water, you can spice it up a little. Add some lemon, or raspberries, or cucumber, or anything that you feel like to give it a little flavour!