Small Steps to Health: Drink More Water!

The Mighty Water Cup. Three of these a day, baby! 

It's time for a good old fashioned project here at Project Project! Goodness, it's been ages. Here's the deal: now that I am finally actually sleeping at night, I'm starting to feel a lot more like a normal person again, and a lot less like a slug. I have more energy which is amazingly awesome (I bought a bike!) and I am finally at a point where I can really start to take care of myself and my health again, which was a really hard thing to do before. I took care of the kids and kind of the house and that was about all I could really handle, which of course I felt crazy amount of mom guilt about. But now that I'm a real girl again, I'm ready to start making some changes. Specifically, some health changes.

Past experience has shown me that if I make small, incremental changes over time, they are much more likely to stick than if I go all out, all at once. So I'm starting small and steady this by drinking more water. Nothing very big or earth shattering, but still something vitally important that I hope will have a big impact over time.

I started on Monday by pulling out my big water cup (the trophy the hospital gave me for having a baby) and looking up how much water I should be drinking in a day. There are a lot varying opinions on this (like with most things on the internet!), but these are the two main ideas that made sense  stood out to me:

1. Drink between half an ounce and an ounce of water for every pound you weigh. So if you weight 150 lbs, you should drink 75 to 150 oz of water per day. And if you weigh more than 150 lbs (hint: I do!), that is a lot of water. A lot! Still, this rule gets repeated a lot by a variety of fairly credible sources, and should definitely be something to reach for over time. 
2. The other rule I saw that I liked was a simple and easy (and mildly gross) one. Basically, make sure that your output matches your input. In other words, if your pee has a color or a smell, drink more water. Pretty simple!

Today is Thursday and I'm on Day Four of changing my watery ways. I'm aiming (and so far, succeeding!) at drinking three 32 oz./950 ml cups of water a day, which brings me in a few oz or ml short of 100 oz or 3 liters a day. And that's in a addition to whatever else I drink in a day. Eventually I'd like to step it up and maybe add a fourth cupful, but for now I'm pretty happy with my efforts. Of course there's only so much difference you can really notice after four days (other than having to scamper off to the bathroom all the time), but I have felt pretty good this week. 

I'll be starting up a new small change on Monday, so stop by then to cheer me on, or maybe even join me yourself. You know you want to (right?)!