With the fall season here, many of us are motivated to make healthy lifestyle changes. One of the most important health changing tasks we give our clients is ask them to drink enough water on a daily basis. The calculation we use is:
Your Weight in kilograms X 0.033=Daily Water Intake in Litres
More details here: http://www.vivianlaw.ca/fat-loss-tip-daily-water-intake-goal/
It is great to have a technical goal and a number to achieve. However, what actually happens in practice on a daily basis is more of a challenge. One challenge that I continually come across is ‘I don’t like plain water’. In fact, this piece is inspired by this question I came across on a UK website:
Q. I really don’t like drinking water but worry that drinking squash each day isn’t good for me?
I really appreciate the honesty of this question. Squash is a sweet beverage that is made by diluting a concentrated syrup, which typically consists of concentrated juice and sugar with water or carbonated water. I can understand that preferring to drink squash and other beverages is a natural consequence to not liking water. Having everyone drinking all the water they need consistently is like a magic bullet that we need in the health and fitness world. However, we are all human and have our idiosyncratic behaviour.
I think that making drinking water more fun will help. Ideally, we would all drink all the water we need in plain water and herbal tea. Since that is unlikely, how about these ideas to help meet your daily water intake goal:
-herbal teas (loose leaf teas have better taste and higher nutritional value)
-low sodium club soda, sparkling water
-infuse water with lemon slices, lime slices, cucumber, herbs, or other fruits
-try warm water with a teaspoon of organic apple cider vinegar
-try adding orange blossom water to plain water for extra flavour
-try plain water or sparkling water with Minisyrup, a natural, concentrated, unsweetened flavouring product. See the story on how: http://www.vivianlaw.ca/healthy-drink-recipe-mango-lime-soda-with-minisyrup/
Natural flavour minisyrup is available in lemon, mango, orange, pear, raspberry, and strawberry kiwi. Order at https://www.zavida.com/minisyrup
For example, if you manage to drink 1/3-1/2 of your daily water intake goal in plain water and drink the rest in the form of the ideas above, you will get to your daily water intake goal faster. You can meet your daily water intake goal more easily by making some small efforts to make water more appealing and fun. Does that sound doable?
