Love it or loathe it, you can’t survive without regularly drinking water. In fact, two days without having any is enough time to kill you.
This shouldn’t mean that you have to spend your life consigned to gritting your teeth and drinking gallons of the stuff though. Luckily, there are numerous little tips and tricks that you can do to help you consume a healthy amount of water throughout the day.
To learn some of these tricks and improve your daily consumption rate going forward, please read on.
Adapt Your Diet: One of the Sneakier Ways to Drink More Water
If you don’t like the taste of water, there is a simple trick to getting it into you – through your diet.
Your body is over 70% water, so you need to regularly replenish your water levels to stay healthy. If you really cannot tolerate drinking it, then eating foods rich in it is the best alternative.
Try to increase your consumption of foods like soups, fruit, and veg. As well as being high in water, these foods are packed with nutrients that will really help to strengthen your body.
If you can get organic fruits and veg, that is even better for your body.
The good news is that you may already enjoy eating these foods. This should mean you can quickly improve your water consumption with little fuss.
Thirst Quenching Water Alternatives
Over the past few years, in particular, we have seen plenty of new water-based health drinks come to market. As well as providing a cure to your third, these drinks often have other health benefits, and taste delicious!
The most famous out of these has to be coconut water. Once reserved for sunny beach holidays in the Caribbean, coconut water has now moved into the mainstream. It can be found at grocery stores and health shops alike.
Coconut water is a fantastic source of potassium and other vital nutrients. Despite all of this healthiness, it is still over 50% water, making it one of the most clever ways to drink more water available.
More recently, a new healthy alternative has entered the scene. Over the past 6 months, cactus water has taken the market by storm in the same way that coconut water did years ago.
Packed full of antioxidants and of course water, these new drinks are vegan and gluten-free. This should make them widely accessible to all dietary requirements. Crucially, though, it contains a high water content and is delicious, which should encourage people who don’t like plain water to drink it.
Get Active
Although it may sound counterintuitive, taking on a new sport or active hobby is one of the perfect ways to drink more water.
As your calorie consumption increases, your body will send you powerful signals to encourage you to take more water onboard. Despite the taste, you’ll soon find yourself drinking significantly more water.
Fast-paced sports such as athletics, gymnastics, rugby, and triathlons are ideal for this. If high-octane adventure isn’t for you, consider hiking or even indoor climbing.
As your fitness and proficiency increases, so too will your requirement for hydration. This will see you drinking water regularly, and this will soon become automatic as your brain creates a stronger association between good performance and hydration.
It’s likely that you will soon be enjoying yourself so much that you will forget why you began doing the sport in the first place.
Create a Habit With an App
These days most people would never let their smartphones out of their site. Take advantage of your phone by installing one of the increasing numbers of apps which are able to monitor your water consumption and keep you on the straight and narrow.
With the rise of wearable technology and increasingly high-tech smartphones, health and fitness apps have become hugely popular over the last few years. Use of health and fitness apps rose by over 330% between 2014 and 2017. This trend certainly has not slowed down.
Similarly to playing sport, these apps will help you to build a habitual relationship with water consumption. As you use the app to drink more frequently, you are strengthening the pathways within your brain.
As these pathways become stronger, drinking water will become easier. Although you may never become fully used to the taste, this will at least reduce the unpleasant associations that you have with water.
This is fantastic as it means that there are many options in the market that offer you ways to drink more water. Here are some of the best ones.
Recommended Apps for Drinking More Water
Fig, a health and wellness app, is available on both iOS and Android devices. It is really useful because it sets you realistic goals and then tracks them on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
This is fantastic, as you can create daily reminders to drink a glass of water. You can then adjust this to match your routine.
You could schedule reminders for first thing in the morning, and then in the periods between the three major meals. This should rapidly increase the amount of water you drink each day.
As well as tracking your water consumption, you can follow other health-related tasks in the app. You could use it to follow a course of medication, supplements or probiotics for example.
Fig is perfect if you are caught up in a busy working environment that you struggle to pull yourself away from. In these scenarios, it’s important to force yourself to take a bit of time away to ensure you’re body gets what it needs.
If you like your water management a bit more cute and cuddly, then Water Nanny is the app for you. The app is again available on both iOS and Android phones.
Plant Nanny creates a visual version of your water consumption, a plant! As you drink water every day, your seedling will develop into a beautiful budding flower.
If you neglect to drink enough water each day and fail to update the app, your plant will visibly wilt. This is a reminder of how your body feels when you are dehydrated.
Drink Your Way to Healthiness
Every single living organism on the planet needs water to survive. Unfortunately, this includes many people who don’t like drinking it.
As you follow these tips, you should so begin to overcome the barriers you have in place which prevent you from drinking more water. This is essential to your longevity and health.
The good news is that with each day that you follow the tips, drinking water becomes easier.
For more health and lifestyle tips, explore our blog pages, which is filled with interesting information and advice.