Water or lack of it actually influences your brain’s functions. Even mild levels of dehydration can interfere with your mood and functioning, especially in young children and older loved ones. If it’s a particularly hot day, there’s a greater risk of having a heat stroke, which is again connected to your brain. Without proper hydration, your concentration, alertness, and even short-term memory are all affected.
Insufficient fluid intake can affect your digestion and contribute to constipation. To keep things moving at a regular and comfortable pace in terms of your digestion, you should drink plenty of water. Any soluble fiber that you consume will effectively bind to the water that you intake. This increases stool bulk and softens your stool, making it easier for you to eliminate waste.
Your kidneys play a central role in controlling water balance and blood pressure as well as expelling waste from the body. By drinking more water, you are supporting those processes and ensuring normal kidney function. You may notice you pee a lot when you drink plenty of water. That’s because your kidney expels more toxins with it. Boosting your water intake also helps prevent the buildup of minerals that can cause kidney stones.
Some studies suggest that increasing your water may help in the weight loss process, especially when consumed instead of other high-calorie beverages. While calorie-sweetened beverages have always had a bad rep of adding on weight, replacing it with water apparently does the opposite. Drinking a glass of water before a meal has been shown to decrease appetite, aid digestion, and boost metabolism.
Cells require a sensitive balance of fluids and electrolytes. Without it, those cells tend to shrivel up, which results in muscle fatigue. When your muscle cells don’t have adequate amounts of fluids, they don’t work as well, and your physical performance suffers. That’s actually the science behind hydrating while exercising. During exercise, you should start drinking fluids early to maintain that balance of fluids & drink them at regular intervals to replace fluids lost by sweating.
Water is life. For that reason alone, everyone should be drinking water all the time. While that’s not always the case, especially if you’ve built a habit of drinking other fluids, you should still strive to drink water regularly and reap the benefits.