Lively Women

Not Sure How Much Water to Drink? Trust Your Thirst

by Kristen King on June 20th, 2007

On the heels of Jennifer Strange’s water intoxication death earlier this year, folks are freaked out about whether they’re drinking too much water or not enough. Georgetown University Medical Center provides some guidelines to help you stay hydrated safely this summer and all year round:

The hyponatremia consensus panel has recommended that everyone, including endurance exercisers, should “drink to thirst” ? that is, drink only when you feel you need to. Verbalis acknowledges that this advice is controversial, because some trainers and sports physiologists contend that “by the time you’re actually thirsty, you have lost enough fluid to already be dehydrated, so they say you need to drink in anticipation of becoming dehydrated. 

“We dispute that notion, and contend that thirst is a good indicator of your body’s need for fluids, and that there is a window of time over which you can rehydrate safely,” he says. While a person “needs to lose about 1-2 percent of body water before thirst will reliably remind you to drink, losing that little is not sufficient to cause any significant health problems,” Verbalis says. “Many of us are often dehydrated to such small degrees, and it does not significantly affect us.” 

But he adds that endurance exercisers who don’t want to rely on their body’s thirst meter have another excellent option, and that is undertaking a sweat test. This involves recording a person’s weight digitally, then running on a treadmill for an hour and recording their ending weight after toweling off the body sweat. “Most people don’t know how much they really sweat while exercising, but this simple test can tell you approximately how much fluid losses you are generating from sweat,” he says. “There is no need to drink significantly more than that, because sweat represents the major source of fluid loss during exercise.”

 

(full report)

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POSTED IN: Exercise, Fitness, Prevention, Wellness