How The Nutrients Work When Your Engine Is Running #3

In addition to the blood vessels dilating and bringing blood to the surface to cool the body, your body also begins to sweat. This is the body's most effective way of cooling itself. The sweat evaporates and results in cooling of the body.

There is a downside to this and that is if you sweat a lot, you can become dehydrated for two reasons. First, if you are sweating you are usually doing some activity that is going to require more oxygen, so you may have an increased respiratory rate. Usually, as you begin to breath faster you will open your mouth and breath through both nose and mouth. This will begin to dry the membranes of the air passages and hence begin the dehydration process. Secondly, as you sweat, you are not only losing water through the skin. If you lick your skin after you have been sweating, it will taste salty, because you lose sodium, chloride and potassium through the skin as well with the sweat. These elements stay on the skin while the water evaporates. Beware that you are replacing what you are losting.

Nutrients That Make Your Body Work #7

The last of the 7 essential nutrients for your body to run smoothly is water. We don't always think of water as a nutrient, but it is vital to the human body. It doesn't have any caloric value and is not a source of energy.

What water does do is transport nutrients and waste in and out of cells. Water is a necessary part of all digestive, circulatory, and excretory functions of the body. In addition, water helps maintain the body temperature.

If you have every been really dehydrated, none of your body functions works properly including your brain. I once got very dehydrated while doing a lot of physical activity on a very hot day. At one point I could not speak except for a word here and there. As they got me cooled down and I started drinking water, after about 15 minutes they asked me to recite the alphabet. I could not do it. It astounded me that I was totally unable to recite the alphabet, but then I knew just hoe dehydrated I had gotten.

Another Word About Sodium

Recently I wrote about how much salt you should intake in a day. One of my readers wrote and asked about what happens when you exercise very vigorously and you sweat, don't you lose more than just water? The answer is yes, you do lose sodium as well.

So here is the answer. If you are going to be doing vigorous exercise where you will be sweating, keep hydrated. You don't need any fancy vitamin water or gatorade. Just keep drinking plain old water. I recommend that you drink filtered water, but if you don't have filtered water then plain water from the tap will do.

To replenish the sodium, do it with organic foods like fruits and vegetables or nuts. If you go for the electrolyte drinks, you will likely over shoot and you will end up raising your blood pressure.

Ten Things To Do To Decrease Stress #3

How much water have you had to drink today? One of the causes of stress in our bodies is to become dehydrated. This stresses all of the muscle cells as well as our brain cells. We tend to take hydration for granted, but it is something we have to work at each day.

The average person does not drink enough water each day. Coffee and tea do not count. These both contain caffeine which actually dehydrates you more. Herbal teas are Ok because they do not contain caffeine.

How much to drink? Se my blog post on 3/05/09 to find out exactly how much water you minimally need each day.

Ice Water to Lose Weight

Dose drinking ice water help you lose weight? While drinking ice water does increase your metabolism in order to maintain a normal temperature, the amount of calories burned in this process are not going to be significant for you to lose a great deal of weight. Remember a few days ago I mentioned that you had to burn 3500 calories more than your intake to burn a pound of fat. Drinking a half gallon of ice water a day will burn about 70 calories. So it does burn some, but really it is a "drop in the bucket" as far as burning enough calories for weight loss.

I'm not advocating to not drink water here, or even ice water for that matter. The bigger problem that most of us suffer from is we are slightly dehydrated most of the time because we do not drink enough water or we think we're doing OK with liquids because we're drinking soda, tea or coffee. Remember that most of these contain caffeine which make you even more dehydrated. Water is the best thing for you to be drinking.