Unseasonably hot, dry weather and a chameleon in my house are reminding me how important it is to hydrate. At a recent party, I listened to a fellow gardener recount her experience of heat exhaustion. Alone in a community garden, she reached the point of losing bladder control. While she managed to get home on her own and avoid a trip to the hospital, she was in a danger zone.
When your body doesn’t have enough fluid, it doesn’t function properly. Dehydration can lead to complications like heat injuries, kidney problems, seizures, and low blood volume shock Electrolyte imbalances resulting from dehydration can cause heart malfunction. These complications can be life threatening in the very young and very old. While most of us may be able to rehydrate fairly quickly, it’s better to prevent the problem than risk the complications.
Proper hydration isn’t just a function of consuming a specific amount of water. Diet, fitness and activity level, alcohol consumption, weather conditions, and medications can affect the amount of fluid you need on any given day. But we still need a starting point to know if we’re at least getting the minimum amount we may need.
Some sources suggest dividing your weight in half to arrive at the number of ounces you need per day. If you weigh 120 lbs, that will be about 7.5 cups (8 oz cups). If you weigh 180 lbs, you’ll need more – around 11.25 cups. I read that as the amount of water alone I need even if I consume additional fluids.
Food, tea, coffee, and soft drinks add fluid, but they can be counterbalanced by sodium content or diuretic properties. Energy drinks add both fluids and electrolytes and can help stave off dehydration during intense activity or heat exposure. But none of these should fully replace water.
An insulated tumbler can help you keep track of the amount of water you’re consuming. Well, that’s if you’re someone unlike me. I like to keep a certain ice/water balance which means I never let the thing get empty before I refill with both ice and water keeping me guessing exactly how much I actually drank. (Reminds me of those parties when the host refills your wine glass before you’ve finished. Yet I digress.) But an insulated tumbler is still a great thing to carry every time you leave your house.
Bottled water and energy drinks are available at any convenience store if you forget your tumbler. Yes, you may consume some plastic drinking them, but that’s better than the possible complications of dehydration.
While most of us may be able to rehydrate fairly quickly, it’s still better to prevent dehydration than deal with ill effects. Older people may not notice any symptoms until they’re already behind the curve so they can get caught off guard by unexpected fatigue, dizziness, or confusion. They may collapse in the garden, or puke on their boots…hiking up a mountain…on a date. (Okay, that last one may only apply to me.)
My first clue that I’m already way behind on fluids is a headache. This can be confusing for a moment if I’ve had a normal amount to drink that day. But when I factor in what I drank the day before, the weather, and my activity, it usually becomes clear there was a gap in hydration I failed to recognize.
In order to avoid such a headache this summer, I carried an ice chest with water in my car even on short trips to the store. This also allowed me to stop at a grocery store for a cold item on the way to another errand rather than having to double back or go out of my way. I’m not sure why I haven’t been doing this for years.
If you don’t love straight water, try filling your ice chest with canned, flavored water. Put a little squeeze of lemon, orange, or lime in your tumbler. You may also want to include some fruit in your ice chest – strawberries, blackberries, watermelon, peaches, and even apples are more than 80% water.
No matter how much you eat or drink, there’s electrolyte balance to consider. Whether you have to supplement sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, fluoride, phosphate, or bicarbonate will depend on your diet and lifestyle as well as your unique metabolism.
Energy drinks like containing electrolytes can take some of the guesswork out of staying hydrated during intense activity. They were originally developed to improve athletic performance. Unfortunately, all of them make me want to puke…on my boots… (oh never mind).
Anyway, the main point of this is to remind you to hydrate, hydrate, hydrate so you can avoid the doctor, doctor, doctor. Drink up!
When you need pain relief, reach for the origin and you may not need a pill. A visiting friend recently asked me for some ibuprofen. I looked in the medicine closet and I didn’t even have acetaminophen. A lack of ibuprofen didn’t surprise me. Every time I take it, my cheeks immediately turn red and start itching so I don’t buy it, but even I was surprised that there was NO pain reliever on the shelf.
Dehydration can increase gastrointestinal symptoms and joint pain. Today it’s 97º with a heat index of 105º. I’ve been without power for the past 4 days since a tree took down my electric lines in a storm. The air is back on now, but it still feels hot in my house. Even minor activity like wiping out the refrigerator I had emptied early in the outage causes me to break a sweat…inside…in the air conditioning. I keep drinking water, but I feel like I can’t get ahead. 