How to move from being dehydrated to hydrated.

I keep on drinking water, and all I am doing is going to the loo all the time – it drives me nuts, and I am still dehydrated. Perhaps it is my constitution?

?Right, the topic of hydration, how much liquid/day. Water is really the only liquid that does hydrate; coffee, alcohol, sugary drinks are all diuretics.

?The average water intake per day is around 2.5 litres, thus approx. 8-10 glasses of water.

?Variants include size of person, climate (outdoors and indoors/radiators); activity and how much a person sweats etc.

?Our diets have a very big influence on our hydration status, the more sugar and refined carbohydrates we consume the more dehydrated we are. Sugars bind to water, roughly in a ration of 3:1, and get stored as glycogen in the blood. When water is bound to glucose to form glycogen it becomes unavailable to hydrate the body.

Too much caffeine (coffee and tea), alcohol, sugar – the more dehydrated we are.

The catch also comes in when we look at our electrolyte and salt status. The key electrolytes that we want in our body are Potassium, Sodium, Magnesium, Calcium and Sea Salt. We also want them in different ratios, for example we want twice as much potassium than sodium, also it does not help if we have enough potassium, but we don’t have enough sea salt.

What about your breathing, especially during the night. Do you sleep with your mouth open? For example I know that one of my client's suffer severely from hay fever and his nose and sinuses are completely blocked, thus my guess is that he must be sleeping with his mouth open, which causes huge amounts of water loss during the night.

This client is also often on the phone, he walks everywhere, however he is often speaking on the phone, which will also result in a lot of water loss.?

Thus, my suggestions for this client:

?Measure how much water you consume a day (choose a weekend day when you are at home) and literally measure every drop of water you put into your mouth; calculate water, alcohol, soft drinks, coffee etc. and measure the volume of urine. ?Yup, wee in a jug.

Whist you are at it, what is the colour of your urine? We want it to be a pale straw colour.

?Let’s see what is the correlation of input and output without running a marathon, living a normal day.

Then, get a good source of electrolytes and take them as prescribed by a professional person.

Depending on your diet, I know that this client eats particularly healthy and fresh, use some sea salt. For any ready-made meal or restaurants these days, use no salt as you already have too much and not good salts in your body.

Curb diuretics, no more than two caffeine drinks per day, moderate alcohol and no (or a minimum) amount of sugar.

To sleep: Tape your mouth for two weeks with K-tape, you will have to get your room pollen-free which would mean a closed window, possible low-grade air-conditioning and/or a room filter.

When you walk, walk with your mouth closed and for the next two weeks, try to only have your conversations indoors, out of the pollen, let your nose act as the filter that you need to safeguard you from the pollen. When you speak so much over the phone, it is a bit like swimming with your mouth open – a big fish, catching small fish.

When you fast for long hours and/or follow a keto diet, you might suffer from a potential loss of potassium, once again, I recommend a good source of electrolytes.

The verdict is out, these are the things that I feel can have an influence on your hydration, no harm to experiment, we might improve we might not, in which case we will accept that it is your constitution, or we will have to tap greater brain power.

Game on.