Should you drink more water to detoxify your body and lose weight?
In many cases, the answer is yes. Many of us don’t drink enough water and we’re missing out on many of its health benefits.
For one, drinking enough water will help you lose water weight. This is because the body holds on to water when it’s dehydrated, but when you introduce more water, it will naturally flush the excess water out.
Drinking water will also help you reduce hunger, cleanse your body of waste, and increase metabolism. We’ll explain all of these benefits below, along with giving you practical tips on how to detoxify and lose weight – by drinking water.
Does Drinking Water Help You Detox?
Water is essential for all of our bodily processes, and detoxification is no exception.
If you’re looking to prevent the build-up of harmful compounds and toxins in your body, then you need your kidneys and liver working at their best.
Kidneys, specifically, filter through an enormous amount of blood every day, where they flush out excess waste and toxins through your urine. But they’re dependant on the water to perform these processes.
Water essentially flushes waste products from your body and enhances nutrient delivery in your tissues.
Without enough water, your colon can get dry. You can imagine the struggle in the bathroom this could lead to!
How Drinking Water Helps You Lose Weight
Drinking water doesn’t just help you detox. It also influences how you lose, gain, or maintain your weight.
Your metabolism needs water to work efficiently. In addition, drinking more water will make you feel full, which in turn helps to prevent cravings. This makes you consume fewer calories and ultimately, can lead to weight loss.
Here are some tips on how to use water to lose weight and detox:
Tips For Losing Weight & Detoxing With Water
Drink it Cold
Drinking your water cold isn’t just refreshing, it’s also good for weight loss. According to WebMD, your metabolism has to work harder to warm your body when you drink cold water. This process forces it to burn more calories. (1)
Use Filtered Water
Here’s the thing: filtered water helps you avoid contaminants typically found in tap water.
While tap water is safe to drink in many countries, it still contains trace amounts of contaminants. The last thing you need when trying to detoxify.
If you want to drink the healthiest water possible, then you should invest into a purification system. Such as a water filter. This provides an additional step in the purification system of your water, removing heavy metals such as lead and cadmium, along with filtering chlorine and other contaminants that may affect the taste and smell of your water.
Drink Before Your Meals
The reason why you should drink before your meals is quite obvious, yet not many people who want to lose weight do that. The fact is, you’ll feel fuller if you drink a glass or two of water before you eat. So when you do eat, you’re likely to end up eating less.
Side note: Try eating your meals more slowly, in addition to drinking water before meals. Your stomach sends signals to the brain that it’s satiated relatively slowly. So if you gobble up your food, you may still feel hungry even though you just had a decent meal. But when you’re eating slower, you may find that it becomes easier to feel full after smaller meals. That’s because the ‘satiety’ signal has time to register in your brain.
Replace Your Sugary Drinks With Water
Sugary drinks are often full of calories, unhealthy ones at that! The topic of sugar and its negative effects on health is out of the scope of this article. But it’s worth keeping in mind that replacing your sugary drinks with plain water will pay off for fat loss. It might not taste as good but over time you’ll get used to it, and you’ll like the benefits it brings you in the mirror.
Drink Enough Water
If you’re really looking to lose weight and detoxify your body, then you should follow the rule most nutritionists recommend, which is to drink 8 glasses of water per day – at least. Depending on your age and lifestyle (e.g. if you’re working out hard), you may need more than that!
Exercise Hydrated
Staying hydrated is of paramount importance for having great workouts. Proper water intake keeps your joints lubricated and your muscles filled with glycogen. This, in turn, helps you have longer and more intense training sessions. Naturally, all of this leads to the ultimate benefit of exercising hydrated, which is weight loss.
Can You Drink Too Much Water?
The dose makes the poison.
While water is healthy and we need it to survive, drinking too much of it can be toxic for your organs – especially the brain.
See, when you drink a lot of water, you flush out your electrolytes and dilute their concentrations in your blood. This includes sodium and magnesium.
Sodium, particularly, is critical here. Your body needs it to maintain optimal fluid balance in and out of your cells.
So when there’s too little sodium in the blood, the extracellular fluids move into your cells. This makes them swell. When brain cells start swelling, it’s a sign of an emergency which can lead to serious consequences.
Conclusion
So there you have it! If you were wondering, now you know that drinking enough fluids can set you up for success on your weight loss & health journey. Water helps to boost your metabolism, suppress your appetite, and clear the body of waste and toxins.
Experts recommend drinking around eight eight-oz glasses (250ml) of water per day. More than that if you’re active and sweat a lot.
Ultimately, water is one of those things that are foundational for good health, yet many of us overlook it. As long as you drink it reasonably (water intoxication is possible from drinking too much water), you’ll only be reaping its awesome benefits.
References
- How drinking more water can help you lose weight. (source)