So here at Chrysalis, one of the things we talk about again and again are the Foundations of Health. We do this for many reasons, but basically it boils down to this: You can’t build health on nothing. As with building anything that you expect to stand, you have to start with a good foundation. Without a good foundation it doesn’t matter how much weight you lift, how many miles you run, how many supplements you take, or if you bathe in oils every day, eventually you will run into something and your health will crumble.

“He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently against that house, and could not shake it, for it was founded on the rock. But he who heard and did nothing is like a man who built a house on the earth without a foundation, against which the stream beat vehemently; and immediately it fell. And the ruin of that house was great.” – Luke 6:48-49

We all want our health to be like the wise man in this illustration, built upon a solid foundation that won’t let us down. Challenges are going to come. Our health WILL face storms, there’s no getting around it. The question then becomes, will it stand or will it fall? So let’s dig down and start talking about these Foundations and what they are.

My favorite Health Foundation to talk about is . . . . . . . Water!! Why? Because it’s super simple and most people realize that they need it to survive. How long can a person last without water anyway? Maybe 3 days? So it makes sense that water would be one of the foundations of health.

So how much water is really enough? And do other drinks count as part of my water consumption?

We highly recommend that you drink half your body weight in ounces of water each day. (If that sounds like A LOT to you, don’t panic! Baby steps. Just start with drinking 1 extra glass of water each day this week. Then add in another next week. And so on. . . )

You see the body absolutely NEEDS water to function properly. Your brain needs water, your blood IS mostly water, your joints need water, and each individual cell is mostly made of, you guessed it, water!

So what happens when the body doesn’t get enough water? Well, that’s when things can start to get dicey. You see, the body is very good at doing what it can to get what it needs. The first thing that the body will do is start holding onto your food longer in order to extract the maximum amount of water out of it. This leads to longer travel times in the colon, which leads to very hard dehydrated stools that are reluctant to leave. You were not made to be a rabbit and your stools shouldn’t resemble theirs! Longer transit times in the colon also leads to the body reabsorbing toxins that it had been trying to excrete, but was unable to because it needed the water. The body will also start stealing water from itself. That can look like several different things:

• Stealing water from joints can make them stiff and hard to move.
• Stealing water from the skin makes it dry, thin, brittle, less supple, and prone to breakage.
• Stealing water from the brain makes it hard to think.
• Stealing water from the blood makes it thick and hard to pump.
• The body will refuse to let any water that it has go, causing tissues to swell with extra water laden with waste.

And no, those cups of coffee and soda and tea laden with sugar do not count as water. They’re introducing in a host of other things I’m not going to talk about today. Suffice it to say if you’re drinking a diuretic like caffeine or alcohol, you need to drink MORE water, not less. In fact you still need to drink half your body weight in ounces of water PLUS the same amount of ounces as you drank of the diuretic. Why? Because the diuretic is “stealing” water from the body by making you pee it out, so you’ve got to replace it for proper function.

I once had a friend in college that explained it to me this way:

If you chase each drink with a glass of water, you won’t get a hangover. Hangovers are caused by dehydration so the water keeps you from getting a hangover!

Not that I’m advocating doing a bunch of drinking, alcohol has it’s own set of problems, but the advice about the water stuck with me over the years. (I never did test out the hangover thing, so don’t take my word for it.) The point is, even at a younger age I knew water was important, I just didn’t realize how important until more recently.

And yes, before you ask, quality also matters. The less stuff in your water the better. The body is actually designed to absorb nutrition from food, not so much from water. So invest in a good filter and drink your water every day.

We’ll talk more about Foundations in our next post, so stay tuned!

Read Part 2 of this series here.

Jessica Meades