Dehydration is a common cause of fatigue but it’s not as simple as just ‘drink more water’…how do you make sure your water is actually hydrating you?
1. Make sure it’s not tap water!
2. Add sea salt to it!
Why not tap water?
Water is an essential part of living and many processes in the body require water so the quality and quantity of water that my clients are consuming is one of the first things I address.
If you aren’t drinking good water then you won’t get well, simple.
The issue with tap water is that it contains numerous toxins including fluoride, chlorine, chloramine (a secondary disinfectant in municipal water), VOCs (the result of chlorine reacting with organic matter) and THMs (by-product predominantly when chlorine is used to disinfect water for drinking), that add to our body’s toxic load, making us more at risk of diseases and gut issues.
Halides, like the chlorine, fluoride, and chloramine in tap water attach to iodine receptors in our body therefore block iodine. Iodine is important for thyroid function and therefore is directly linked with our energy level. By simply no longer drinking tap water you could see a massive change in your health.
Drink good quality spring water (for Asia/Pacific regions these are Fiji, Hawaiian Springs, Waikea, Ka-Vita, Eternal (from New Zealand))…or make sure your water is properly filtered for pesticides, herbicides, radiation, heavy metals, copper, and drug residues, but NOT minerals.
Reverse osmosis water is not recommended. Even if the RO water is remineralised, the mineral profile is still far too low to be hydrating for your body and the water is essentially acidic. Tank water can contain heavy metals so also needs adequate filtration.
You want to drink half your body weight in pounds, in ounces of water daily (around 1.8 litres for a 60kg person). And you want to make sure to add 1/4 tsp of unrefined white sea salt to each litre (the pink Himalayan, and grey Celtic varieties have been found to be high in heavy metals).
Why the salt?
Without sodium and potassium balance, life isn’t possible. It’s what dissolves our minerals, like calcium and magnesium, making them bioavailable, and it’s what allows things to cross through the cell membrane and into our tissues (i.e. hydrate our cells amongst other things!).
The water we drink nowadays is recycled through the system many times and is incredibly lacking in minerals. This means we aren’t properly hydrated when we drink it (remember your osmosis lessons at school!). It is also heavily laden with toxins that further stress our body, so it is important that you only drink purified water.
By adding a high-quality mineral salt like grey Celtic sea salt to our water, we can improve the mineral profile of our water greatly and help our cellular permeability.
Don’t be scared of salt! Sodium was thought to cause high blood pressure but in truth very few people are negatively affected, and studies show that diets with less salt are actually more harmful. Low sodium diets raise LDL (bad) cholesterol, reduce sex drive, and raise insulin resistance.
Now be sure I am not referring to table salt. This is usually a mix of chemically extracted pure sodium and toxic aluminium anti-caking agents. Pure sodium can cause excessive thirst, cellulite, rheumatism, arthritis, gout, kidney stones, and gall stones.
High quality sea salts, and rock salts however contain a blend of minerals including sodium thereby maintaining mineral balance. I only recommend sea salts to my clients as rock salt sourcing is often hard to determine and they can often be high in heavy metals (the pink colour, for example, is from iron oxide).
When we wake, our body is acidic and struggles to push our potassium levels down and our sodium levels up causing strain on our adrenals. By drinking half a teaspoon of mineral salt in a litre of warm water in the first hour of waking, your energy in the morning can be greatly improved. You should not feel thirsty after drinking such balanced salts. If you experience bloating or loose stools then back off the amount of salt until you don’t experience these symptoms, then gradually increase the salt amount over several days. It just means you are very dehydrated and need to rehydrate slowly.
I recommend all my clients add unrefined sea salt to their purified water as a multimineral supplement to support their body (I love Crucial Four Icelandic Sea Salt).