I was once told to drink a gallon of water each day for several days to flush out a kidney stone. I remember thinking, hahaha, that's funny. I can't even drink the recommended eight glasses per day, let alone twice that. I managed the recommended eight per day for a few days and suffered for it. Achy sides, nausea, and the feeling that my brain was turning to mush. That, and I had to pee every twenty minutes, even if seemingly very little came out. Which was crazy, because I gained five pounds in a couple days' time. That's probably because I was dehydrated, right? But I didn't like having the stone, so I did it. Until I was sure it was gone.
I don't like being hydrated. Achy sides, peeing water every 20 minutes (and seemingly not nearly enough of it considering how much I'd been putting in), not being able to think, and especially nausea are not things I want to live with on a permanent basis. I couldn't believe people live with this all the time, though, so I began to question the doctor's insistence that drinking that much water is GOOD for people. Looking for information on the topic of "too much water" actually yielded some surprising results. You can die from drinking too much water.
Let me state that again. YOU CAN DIE FROM DRINKING TOO MUCH WATER.
What? Really? Yep. Especially if you drink too much too fast.
I don't recall if I'd found a list of the symptoms at the time, but I recently found them at livestrong.com. Read for yourself.
Nausea, disorientation, fatigue, vomiting, frequent need to urinate, headache. And it doesn't necessarily take what we might consider a lot of water to cause it. It can occur if your body thinks it needs to retain water and you drink water anyway. The body apparently decides how much is too much. It doesn't have to be a lot.
The last part really got to me. What if my body is tuned to where it always thinks that it needs to retain water? This would explain why I don't sweat much (noticeably), why I overheat so easily sometimes. And it could certainly explain why drinking a lot of water completely overwhelms me and gives me symptoms similar to water toxicity.
I've since tried, on occasion, to slowly increase my liquid intake. It doesn't cause the achy sides, but I still feel like my head gets weirded out at times. It seems to be a pretty fine balance if my body isn't specifically asking me for something through thirst. Yes, I've heard that thirst is a symptom of dehydration. As I said, I don't like being hydrated. Also of note: Despite not drinking "enough," I seldom feel thirsty in the summertime. In fact, I feel more thirsty in the wintertime than I do any other time of the year… and I drink more. I figure it's because the dry air sucks moisture out of my skin and my body realizes he needs to add it back in. The only exception to this that I can think of was when we went to Arizona and it was very dry there. It was hot, but I didn't feel hot at first. It hit me fast. Suddenly I began seeing things and feeling dizzy. Dale led me to shade and told me to sit down and drink water. I did, and eventually came back to life. I didn't feel weird from drinking that time, despite not having known I was thirsty until the liquid began to seep into me. But after that, I was thirsty there, and kept drinking. I didn't pee more than usual, either. The only thing I can think of is that my body had never experienced a super hot day in the sun without humidity before. Hot days around here usually come with humidity, and I wilt in that combination so I avoid it like the plague. Let me tell you something, though. As much as I normally detest being out in the sun, Arizona sunshine is gorgeous.
Anywho, the point of this post is that I don't know how to get my body to want more water. However, most of the time it seems to do pretty well on its own. I'm very healthy, and I've learned to flush out my kidneys whenever I get the slightest inkling that a stone might be forming. So, I reason that perhaps I should leave well enough alone.
I do need to slacken off on the plain tea sometimes, though. It contains stone-forming oxalates. LOL.
~w
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