Hydration Mastery: How Much Water, What Type, & How to Create the Habit for Health

My new book The Alkaline Life is out now! Order your copy here 👇

https://learn.liveenergized.com/alkalinelifebook1

In this video, I discuss our body’s most vital and overlooked nutrient—water.

We uncover the significance of hydration, presenting practical steps to make hydration a daily habit.

I show you the data and studies to show the real impact of chronic, low-grade dehydration, and the simple daily steps you can take to put your hydration habit on autopilot. You’ll learn how much you need, and the ways to make it delicious.

I also show you why tap and bottled water might not be the answer you’re looking for.

As mentioned in the video, you can download my Definitive Guide to Alkaline Water here: https://learn.liveenergized.com/learn-to-make-alkaline-water

Transcript:

It’s impossible to be dehydrated and reach your health goals. Hi, I’m Ross Bridgeford, the author of the bestselling book, the Alkaline Reset Cleanse, and my new book, The Alkaline Life. And today we are talking about hydration and it’s a topic I get really excited about because it’s simple, it’s easy, everyone can do it, and so few people are doing it.

And that makes me excited because it means you’ve got massive amounts of improvement that can be made just like that. Hydration is one of those things that when you get it right, it makes everything easier and it gives you a huge lift of energy, of mental clarity of, so every health goal, they say the rising tide lifts all ships, which is a good analogy when it comes to water and hydration, but it’s true. When you are properly hydrated, all of your health goals improve. Every step towards defeating a health challenge gets that bit closer and it’s well within your grasp.

It surprises me, but a lot of the time when people join my coaching group, the Alkaline Life Club, the very first thing we do is we have a back and forth and we get their plan set up and we work out where they’re at, what their goals are, what they’re doing, and how we can start getting some quick wins with minimal effort. And so often I say to people, what’s your hydration like? And they sort of get a bit sheepish and they go, oh, it’s not great. I mostly just drink coffee and tea.

And I go, “yes”…I celebrate because I know I’m about to get huge breakthroughs for them within 48 hours,  sometimes even within 24 hours by just fixing their hydration.

Today, my goal for you is to leave the short video with a plan, a plan for you, some clarity on how you are gonna get from where you are now to properly hydrated day in, day out without even having to think about it. First, I wanna point out some of the dangers of being dehydrated, and we are not talking dehydrated to a medical degree where you’d have to be in hospital with a drip. I’m talking about the chronic low grade dehydration that is so impactful and so deleterious to our health. On your screen now is just one study that was published in the journal that Animals of Family Medicine in 2016, and is shown that those who don’t stay properly hydrated have got a 150% greater risk of being overweight or obese.

The researchers looked at over 9,500 adults between 2009 and 2012 and looked specifically at the correlation between BMI and dehydration. And their conclusion was telling, they said, we found a significant association between inadequate hydration and elevated BMI and inadequate hydration and obesity even after controlling for confounders. This is incredible. More research on the screen now shows that dehydration in the studies, in the literature has been linked to poor cognitive health, cognitive performance and increased risk of cancer, chronic kidney disease, stone formation, cardiovascular disease, and all manner of other conditions. This is so important and another study here from the New England Journal of Medicine showing the fluid intake and the risk of bladder cancer in men. Looking across 10 years at 47,909 participants, they found that a higher fluid intake was associated with a decreased risk of bladder cancer in men, and this was only six cups of water a day versus one cup of water a day. The impact that proper hydration can have on your health, the quality of your health, your longevity is huge. We need to get it right, but why are so few of us doing it? In my experience of coaching this stuff over the last 20 years, I have found that there are three main reasons why most people don’t drink enough water.

And in this video we’re gonna cover all three and I’m gonna give you solutions to all three. First, I want to quickly touch on how much water should we be drinking a day? Now, before I actually give you an amount, it’s important to know that one size fits one, it’s not the same amount for everyone. However, I don’t want to get too bogged down in minutiae and detail.

This is where we can get overwhelmed and stressed and go, ah and give up. Typically, for 99% of people, it’s between a hundred to 125 fluid ounces a day, three to four liters. Don’t let that stress you out. The equation that is on your screen now will allow you to work out the specific amount of milliliters or ounces that is right for you right now, but for most of us, don’t get too bogged down in it. As long as you having at least on average, around a hundred fluid ounces a day and up to 120, 130, you’re absolutely fine. If you are currently in that category of I don’t really drink any water at all at the moment, I drink tea and coffee, don’t think you have to go from zero to 130 ounces a day today.

You can build up slowly, start by aiming for 60 ounces, then 80, then a hundred. You can do this over a period of weeks. As with all of these health goals we set, you’re getting improvements as you move along. You know how great are you gonna be feeling a week from now? If you’re having 60 to 80 ounces of water a day for a whole week, you’re gonna be feeling amazing. When you are already feeling amazing, it’s easier To then add more in. This is the foundation of all of my coaching in a nutshell. Start small baby steps, build the process, turn it into a habit, make it easy, and then add more. Don’t try and do it all at once. Don’t try and be perfect from day one.

That is a recipe and a shortcut to disaster. So if we are looking to consume around a hundred to 120 ounces a day, where are the pitfalls that most people are stumbling into right now? The first one, not remembering. We forget this is the biggest hurdle for most people. We forget in the Alkaline Life Club. This is something we go into in a lot of depth to get people properly set up and properly hydrated as quick as we can.

I’m gonna take you through one exercise now that’s really, really powerful and it just takes a minute and it’s my habit linking exercise. So many of us, we set our intention to go, got it, Ross, I’m gonna start drinking enough water. I’m start now. Crack on, gets to 10 o’clock at night, oh, forgot again, and you can’t go and just drink a hundred ounces of water at 10 o’clock at night.

That’s not gonna end well for anyone. So we wake up the next day and go right today, today’s the day I’m gonna drink loads of water. Today I’m gonna be really well hydrated. This is gonna be brilliant. I’m gonna start right now. I’m gonna go sink. I’m gonna have a big glass of water. Brilliant. 10 o’clock comes out.

I didn’t drink any water again, I only had that one glass. So what I suggest if you are in this situation is habit linking. This is something I learned when I worked at a big beverage manufacturing company. I was in the marketing team, the innovations team to be precise for a very big drinks company in a past life many years ago. And they taught me a methodology that they used in slightly more nefarious ways.

But if you want to get someone hooked on doing something, IE forming a new habit, you link it to an occasion or a habit they already have in their life. So where we can use this for good with hydration is we can go, what are you already doing during the day? You are waking up, hopefully you are waking up, you get a glass of water.

What else are you doing every day without foul? You’re cleaning your teeth twice a day. You are traveling to work. You might be doing your housework, you might be taking the kids to school, you might be taking the kids to sports activities nonstop. You might be going to the gym, you arrive at work, you make meals three times a day.

There’s all these things that we all do every day without fail. Simply linking a glass of water or some hydrating beverage to each of those occasions, even if you only do that three or four times a day. So waking up, cleaning your teeth in the morning, cleaning your teeth at night on your commute to work, brilliant, that’s a great start.

Everything else is a bonus. You can easily get to 80 90 ounces a day. Just with that, just with that on the screen now, you’ll see my example of what I did when I implemented this to get myself, it’ll be in milliliters of course, but what I did to get to my three and a half to 4,000 milliliters of water a day,

this is how I did it, and it worked and it worked immediately. And this eliminates the issue of forgetting. ’cause even if you follow it, only 60, 70%, you’re still doing so much better. You’ve taken that first baby step forward and we can build from here. This is one of the four principles of my alkaline life habit framework. If you’ve bought the book, you’ll know the other three, but this is one of them. It’s about making it really simple and obvious and clear and easy in your life. If you wanna form a habit, don’t make it hard. Make it simple. By following this, you will drink enough each day and you can keep building up and building up until you get to that hydration goal.

The second issue, the second stumbling block most people have is they feel like they need to go to the toilet all the time. Now, this isn’t one that needs a solution because I assure you, if this is a concern for you, the more you get hydrated, the less this will be an issue. Within a week to 10 days, this won’t be an issue.

The analogy that I’ve used for many years now, some of you will have heard this before, is when you’re dehydrated, you think of your body as like a dried up old, horrible little sponge in your kitchen. When you’ve got that dried up old sponge and you run it under the tap, at first the water just bounces off it and goes everywhere,

makes a mess. But little by little, if you keep a trickle of water running onto it, it starts to get more and more absorbent and it expands and the total amount of water it can hold becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. This is what your body is like when you go from dehydrated to becoming hydrated. The more your body gets used to this, the more it will use it. It will be absorbable by your cells and it’ll be utilized and it will be sent around the body. Your blood will become so much more healthy and you’ll become so much more energized. So please don’t stress about this, just this is why I say don’t go from zero to four liters or 130 ounces on one day. You build up, you take it one step at a time and this will not be an issue. The third stumbling block is we’ve gotta make it tasty. We don’t necessarily want to just drink boring old water every day. We can use other things to get hydrated. Herbal teas, broths, bone broths, veggie broths, amazing flavor, your water, something I love to do.

This is something we do in the Alkaline Life Club all the time. We post these pictures all the time is we get a big jug, we fill it with water, and then we fill it with loads of delicious stuff. Your imagination is the only limitation here. It can be strawberry and basil. It could be cucumber and mint, it could be lemon, it could be ginger and turmeric. It can be herbs like rosemary and and rosemary, and lemon goes really well. It could be watermelon and mint. It could, there is no limitation here, and you just get it in there, give it a bit of a muddle, delicious, and you can just keep refilling it and refilling it. Hydration does not need to be boring.

Your green drinks, your smoothies, your soups. These all contribute to your hydration. And when you think of it in this way, if you think about that habit linking and going, when I wake up, when I clean my teeth, when I commute to work, when I get to my desk, when I clean my teeth at night, and you had, let’s say, a 300 milliliter glass on each of those occasions, you’re nearly at two liters already. You’re halfway there, and then when you’re at work during the day, you have three or four cups of herbal tea. Boom, you’ve made it brilliant. Done. This can be really, really simple, and it brings us onto the final part of this video that I really wanna try to bring some ease and which is around filtration,  the different types of water, alkaline water, reverse osmosis, different types of machines and equipment. There’s a lot to cover, there’s a lot to cover, and it’s too much for one video. What I’ve got below this video for you to download is my guide called The Definitive Guide to Alkaline Water. It will walk you through eight different ways of filtering and fixing your water.

It will give you the pros and cons of each, the costs of each, what’s good, what’s bad, what I recommend, what you should avoid, and it’ll give a little bit more information on the topics we’ve covered in this video as well. And I recommend, as soon as this video is finished, you go and you download that guide. It’s really fantastic.

I’ll put a heck of a lot of effort and many, many, many, many hours into pulling this information together for you. I do want to stress the importance of filtration and how dodgy our tap water can be and our bottled water on the screen. Now, a few newspaper reports into the quality of tap water that you’re seeing. These are frightening.

Chlorine in water increases birth defects. Chemicals in tap water could cause a hundred thousand cases of cancer in the US Cancer Alert over South Australia’s tap water, chemical spills, brain eating amoebas, lead toxic arsenic levels. This is in your Water supply. It’s in my water supply. It’s a problem. We know in tap water there is chlorine, there’s chloramines,  there’s disinfectant byproducts, there’s heavy metals, there’s lead, there’s pesticides and herbicides. It’s really important that we get these out of our water. I cover this as well in the guide, and I don’t want you to be freaked out because honestly, your body does have a degree of resilience and being hydrated with tap or bottled water is better than being dehydrated.

It is worse for you to be dehydrated. So I don’t want you to get bogged down and not drink water while you are waiting to find a filter or some means to sort of fix your water. But it is important that we start thinking now about what the solution is gonna be, what your budget is, what your family’s needs are, where you want to go next with this to make sure your water is the best quality it can be.

We are drinking water all day, every day. Hopefully it’s one of the substances we are putting into our body. After air water is probably the next most bountiful and abundant substance we are putting into our body. It’s important that it’s right. So download the guide below the video now. I can’t wait to touch base with you again soon. On the next video, if you’ve got any questions, leave a comment below the video. I will get to all of your questions personally, and I’ll see you on the next video. Make sure you like and subscribe and share as well. If this message has helped you, it will help me and it will help me to further my mission and my purpose in life, which is to make all of you reach your health goals as easily,  effortlessly, and as enjoyably as possible. As quick as I can see you on the next video.