Time for the Water

I think I have been dehydrated for most of my life. Thats not an exaggeration, I really think I have. When I was younger, my mom being the health nut that she is, but also balancing four children, would take us to McDonalds three days a week but she MAKE us order a milk with our happy meal and I always watched it fade into warmth, while I dreamed of an icy Hi-C in it’s place. When I was growing up, fat free and diet soda’s were also all the rage, so I was either hopped up on my Dad’s sugar free Kool-aid or my Mom’s diet coke that she would keep on the inside door of her fridge. In high school, I would go to my best friends house and slurp down Pepsi with barbecue Humpty Dumpty chips, and no one ever carried around bottles of water with stickers on them, feigning a movement to save the sea turtles. I guess we weren’t cool enough?

The only time I have ever properly been hydrated is during my pregnancies because I think that was the only time I have ever been truly concerned about what goes into my body, but that’s kind of sad so we will keep going. I used to bring all of these bottles of water to work with me and I would not leave until I had drank all of the bottles. A few years ago, for two and half days, I did a water challenge, but I had to pee so much, I abanoned it after that, and deemed water challenges ineffective and boring.

I recently began subscribing to Rachel Hollis and her blog and if you have read any of her books she pushes hydration like crazy. Every day she drinks about a billion gallons of the stuff, runs a million dollar company and has four kids. I decided it would be best to start with a few glasses. Normally I like to meet my running buddy in Hallowell on either an empty stomach or little bit of black coffee. This winter I would finish up our run and take another sip of cold black coffee and then head to Starbucks, buy a cold brew, go into work and ask my teaching partner if she would like a coffee to get us through the rest of the day. Sometimes I would drink one of those cans of seltzer for lunch, but usually just the coffee. Yikes, thats not a lot of hydration is it? But coffee addicts don’t really notice their bad habits, until they start incorporating good ones.

So three weeks ago, I pulled out a water bottle that holds 36 ounces of water. It fits in zero cup holders, can’t really stand up in my fridge and sweats water all over the table, but these are all small problems in comparison of the peeing that would need to happen. At first it was a struggle to finish one in a day. It turns out if you drink a full bottle of one of these guys, then you can’t have three cups of coffee, just because your stomach is so darn full. You also can’t snack like a 12-year-old boy. This took some getting used too, because of the loving of the coffee and the loving of the snacking. I also discovered that I would need to pee every 28 seconds. I think at first my body was like what the hell is happening here, we are not used to this kind of hydration and had a full system freak out. After a week, this began to get better, but the other issue is when you aren’t at home.

This weekend I had the opportunity to board both a jet ski and a boat. While this soothed my Kardashian soul, I found the water that I had consumed really started to backfire and I began to sweat with worry at how I would be able to pee in the middle or this lake with all these party people. In a quick consult with Ashley, who is always the giver of good solid advice, I attempted to do a delicate slide into the water to give the good fish a proper urine bath. Things backfired when I wasn’t wearing a proper bathing suit and the temperature wasn’t bath like and my lower extremities seized up so that I could not even pee for a good 5 to 6 minutes. Damn you good hydration!

Boat shame aside, I am going to keep up this water challenge as the summer continues. It turns out it is also good for my terrible skin, helps marginally with weight loss, limits the amount of nachos I can eat in one sitting and helps me save money. It’s hard to argue with all that and so I must plow forth in my water intake. I heard through the grapevine you can buy some contraption through amazon that will allow you to pee any place of your choosing. You no longer have to brave a dark, fecal dripping, urine infested port-a-potty and so maybe this is something to look into? I don’t know. I’m not against embarrassing myself still. Happy Monday everyone and happy hydrating.