You must have wondered why doctors advise drinking at least one liter of water each day. What's the mystery behind this? What are the advantages of drinking water? Actually, many people claim that the main benefit of drinking a lot of water is to achieve a natural glow and bright skin tone. If you keep yourself well-hydrated, it will enhance your energy levels, make your concentration sharper, and guarantee proper organ functioning. This article shall deal with how hydration can be maintained, the numerous advantages of staying properly hydrated, especially relevant in a country like India. Let's explore this subject in more detail.

Introduction to Hydration for Health: How Does Water Work in Our Body?

Hydration is the act of providing water to your system, thus ensuring proper body functions. Water regulates body temperatures, digestion, nutrients translocation, and washout of waste products from the body. Hydration is taking sufficient amounts of water in the body thus enabling your cells, tissues, and organs to function optimally. Proper hydration increases energy, attention, and feeling. Proper hydration is crucial in India, where temperatures can rise sharply. Dehydration quickly sets in, leading to symptoms including headaches, weariness, dry skin, and thirst.

An Overview of the Health Benefits of Hydration

Water is another integral component of the human body, for instance, regulating the temperature of the body, protecting inner organs, and helping digest the ingested food. It constitutes about 75 percent of the whole muscle tissue and about 10 percent of fat tissue. In cells, it helps to carry nutrients to the living tissues and takes away the waste material from it. 

Since over half of the human body is composed of water, it is essential to live. We lose water from perspiration, respiration, and other bodily functions. Hydration should thus be constant. Common signs of dehydration include thirst, headache, dry skin, dry mouth, and darker urine. These symptoms often can be treated by drinking fluids.

Health Benefits of Staying Hydrated

Here are 6 health benefits of hydration that you must know, especially important for people living in India's diverse climate:

• It improves Physical Performance: Proper hydration increases endurance, strength and reduces the feeling of fatigue while performing physical work.
• Hydration helps digest food, enabling nutrient absorption. Water also prevents constipation, making digestion healthy.
• Improves brain function: People who consume enough water tend to concentrate, focus, and be able to memorize things. Staying hydrated reduces cognitive fatigue and headaches.
• Maintains Body Temperature: Although water causes sweating and helps in cooling the body, hydration controls body temperature.
• Reduce the Urinary stones: Particularly kidney stones, are painful mineral crystals that form in the urinary system. Increasing water intake may help prevent recurrence by diluting urine, reducing the likelihood of crystal formation.
• Control weight: Drinking a lot of water also tends to help lose weight since it boosts one's metabolism and increases satiety, thus helping less intake of calories and, by extension, more significant pound loss in the long run. 

Water drinks before meals make one feel fuller, and hence can consume fewer calories, maybe with higher losses in the long run.

Benefits of Drinking Water for Skin

• Develops Skin Flexibility: Maintaining collagen production through proper hydration helps in reducing the visibility of wrinkles and fine lines.
• Improves a Healthy Brightness of the face: Maintaining proper hydration encourages blood flow, which contributes to the natural, healthy glow of your skin.
• Avoids Dry skin: Hydration remains the skin hydrated, which protects it from getting dry and cracked and gives it a softer, smoother appearance.
• Decreases Swelling: Water consumption supports the removal of extra sodium, which eliminates puffiness, particularly around the eyes.
• Improves skin Healing: Hydration promotes a quicker recovery from skin irritation or damage by enhancing the skin's natural capacity to repair and regenerate.

The most widely held belief is that drinking 8–10 glasses of water daily improves skin hydration and clears complexion, but such scientific support for these claims is limited. Indeed, the skin does play a crucial role in maintaining body hydration and preventing water loss; it is about 30% water, contributing to its elasticity and resilience. 

Although drinking water may hydrate skin, especially when one has a poor intake first, drinking water does not prevent wrinkles, which are induced by genetics, sun exposure, and environmental causes. Topical moisturizers are more effective on hydrated skins in enhancing the texture and appearance of the skin.

How Much Water Do You Need?

General Hydration needs the majority of healthy people can meet their hydration needs by drinking water and other fluids when they feel thirsty.

• For general hydration, women require about 2.3 liters daily and men about 3.3 liters from both drinks and food.
• Exercise and Physical Activity: Hydrate each time you exercise strenuously even if it sweats from within by drinking lots of water. Pre-exercise, during, and post-exercise hydration helps the amount of water that is lost in exercise.
• Pregnancy and Breastfeeding: Pregnancy women need an increased fluid intake, roughly 300 ml of water per day. For breastfeeding, the fluid to be taken should be increased around 700 ml to replace the amount that is lost in milk production.

Fluid intake is not only in pure water form. There are other fluids that would give their contributions to daily fluid intake, such as coffee, juice, tea, coconut water and milk. Foods with high-water content also add to fluid and food intake. Hydration needs are fulfilled through fluids at 80% and food at 20%. [1] [2] [3].

What are the Factors affecting hydration?

These are the factors that affect hydration:

• Exercise and Physical Activity
• Climate and Weather
• Health Conditions
• Pregnancy and Breastfeeding

Environmental and Health Factors:

• Hot, humid climates or high altitudes increase fluid needs. Illnesses such as fever, vomiting, diarrhea, or conditions like urinary tract infections may also require extra water intake.

• Many of the chronic diseases are multifactorial, and lifestyle and environmental factors represent major causes. While there is much attention placed on severe dehydration, certainly mild dehydration may be the trigger for several health problems that would seem at least worthy of further study. 

Good hydration is associated with having a low risk of urolithiasis, hypertension, and coronary heart disease, and more clinical trials are required to confirm those effects. However, its impact on such others as bladder or colon cancer is still inconsistent.

Signs of Dehydration 

Here are some common signs of dehydration:

• Dry Mouth and Skin: Body contains lesser fluids in the mouth, due to dehydration and results in dryness.
• Fatigue or Dizziness: One becomes weak or feels dizzy, which are the results of dehydration.
• Thirst: The first sign of low fluid levels in the body.
• Dark Urine: Urine is darker and thicker when dehydration of the body causes the retention of water.
• Less Sweating: Body could reduce its sweating to retain water.
• Headache: The intensity of this pain, in this case, dehydration results in headache for the simple reason that little blood and oxygen reach the brain.

How Can You Recognize When You Need to Drink More Water?

Here are some of the indicators that you must drink more water:

• Often feeling thirsty: The instant you feel like drinking, your body already craves to have more fluids.
• Smell of pee being too strong or dark: This calls for the need to drink more water as the urine is too concentrated.
• Dry skin and dry, chapped lips: Dehydration may cause dryness in the skin or on the lips.
• Low Energies: Dehydration can cause low energy or a lack of energy.
• Regular Headaches: Dehydration can be the cause of headaches, and you know when it is time to drink more water.

You can be at your best and hydrated by paying attention to these physical signs.

Conclusion:

Proper hydration will help to keep people healthy and energized in India's vast climates and active lifestyle culture. Hydration supports all of the tasks, from clear mental acuity to the physical stamina requirements, associated with tasks in everyday life. Protects against dehydration-related conditions common in warmer parts of the country as well as when under intense physical exertion. Hydrating foods and fluids become easily incorporated into daily habits to help better the overall health outlook. The habit of hydration can benefit one's self and others and create multiple ripples for overall well-being. Stay hydrated, stay healthy!

FAQ’s:

Dr. Alakha AS, BAMS

Dr. Alakha graduated, BAMS physician from MGR University P.S. Varier Ayurveda College in Kottakkal