I frequently find myself insufficiently hydrated. Symptoms of dehydration are headaches, mood swings, and dizziness or lightheadedness. You mention that your headaches are worse when you work out, which may be a flag for this. Anemia also shares some symptoms with dehydration.
Thirst is not a good dehydration indicator for some people. I can easily get so dehydrated that I’ll get dizzy when I stand up, and I still won’t realize it was caused by dehydration until I go over everything in my health diary. It’s possible your body doesn’t signal thirst to you very well, so you’re chronically dehydrated.
If you haven’t already done this test, I’d suggest drinking a significantly higher amount of water for a week and seeing if that has any effect.
Do you know if tea is a good way to be hydrated? I now drink green tea mostly, because I’m too used to black tea with sugar and I’m afraid that that much sugar might be bad for health.
I haven’t looked at Alicorn’s data, but when I get a headache my first two hypotheses are that its caused by either dehydration or caffeine withdrawal. Either I drink something caffeinated or drink about 16-24 fluid ounces of water and then re-assess after about 20 minutes. If whichever I tried doesn’t work then I do the other thing plus take a pain killer (choosing between aspirin, acetaminophen, or ibuprofen based on other considerations) because by that point I just want the problem to go away rather than to gain a bit of information about which particular solution fixed things. Usually, my first experiment works and no pain pill is required.
Caffeine is a diuretic (meaning it makes you pee) meaning you have to drink more than otherwise in the long run to balance this effect.
Something potentially worth noting if you’re drinking a lot of green tea is that its cancer preventing effects appear to follow a dose response curve that has been experimentally observed up to six or seven cups a day, so drinking a lot of it can be worthwhile if that’s important to you. Green tea’s cancer-protecting mechanism is probably a body-wide up-regulation of apoptosis (programmed cell death) killing potentially cancerous cells earlier than otherwise. One minor worry with this (that I’ve never seen addressed in the literature which is more of an untrustworthy pet theory of mine) is that apoptosis up-regulation can presumably cause more neurons to die and apoptosis inhibiting mutations like BRCA1 have been suggested as leading to higher IQ. My guess is that there may be a trade-off here between raw biological longevity and high fluid intelligence.
For my body, three liters a day counts as ‘a lot’, but I work heavily as well. It’s also a ‘goal level’ for work out periods, so it’s factored to keep in mind the fact that I don’t naturally want to drink that much. (Eg, that level is designed to buffer for the days I may forget or fail to do so)
I had to drink two full glasses of water a day for a bit more than a week when I was on antibiotics and noticed no effect except that I was really annoyed about having to drink that much water. Would the antibiotics have constituted a confounding factor if your hypothesis were true?
I wouldn’t describe anything I do as “working out”.
In the US, the reference daily intake (RDI) for water is 3.7 litres per day (l/day) for human males older than 18, and 2.7 l/day for human females older than 18[7]
Either they are very large glasses, or you are not drinking even close to an appropriate amount of water.
I would still think that two glasses is not enough of a swing. Periods of high water usage can drastically change how much our bodies require. After a single one hour workout, the recommended fluid replacement can be as high as forty six ounces for some body types and activity levels; that’s six glasses of water or well over a full liter bottle. Two glasses is comparatively microscopic. Antibiotics may also be confounding since they tend to come concurrently with other issues and could cause diarrhea.
I’d recommend picking up two one-liter bottles of Powerade* per day and using those as your drink gauge, in addition to your normal diet while you test. It’s actually fairly hard to overhydrate yourself except in extreme circumstances, and taking a sports drink should be extra protection. If you find a flavor you like, it can help turn a chore into something you...well something you at least don’t hate.
*Powerade contains more potassium than Gatorade and the same amount of sodium. Since most people have sodium in excess and are potassium deficient, Powerade is generally the better bet. Warning: that may be partial rationalization just because my local grocer tends to have it on sale for $0.50 a liter and I like the taste.
I second this advice. I have observed on myself quite a strong correlation between dehydration and headaches. Perhaps you should record how much have you drunk and when.
Have you tried drinking a lot of water?
I frequently find myself insufficiently hydrated. Symptoms of dehydration are headaches, mood swings, and dizziness or lightheadedness. You mention that your headaches are worse when you work out, which may be a flag for this. Anemia also shares some symptoms with dehydration.
Thirst is not a good dehydration indicator for some people. I can easily get so dehydrated that I’ll get dizzy when I stand up, and I still won’t realize it was caused by dehydration until I go over everything in my health diary. It’s possible your body doesn’t signal thirst to you very well, so you’re chronically dehydrated.
If you haven’t already done this test, I’d suggest drinking a significantly higher amount of water for a week and seeing if that has any effect.
Do you know if tea is a good way to be hydrated? I now drink green tea mostly, because I’m too used to black tea with sugar and I’m afraid that that much sugar might be bad for health.
I haven’t looked at Alicorn’s data, but when I get a headache my first two hypotheses are that its caused by either dehydration or caffeine withdrawal. Either I drink something caffeinated or drink about 16-24 fluid ounces of water and then re-assess after about 20 minutes. If whichever I tried doesn’t work then I do the other thing plus take a pain killer (choosing between aspirin, acetaminophen, or ibuprofen based on other considerations) because by that point I just want the problem to go away rather than to gain a bit of information about which particular solution fixed things. Usually, my first experiment works and no pain pill is required.
Caffeine is a diuretic (meaning it makes you pee) meaning you have to drink more than otherwise in the long run to balance this effect.
Something potentially worth noting if you’re drinking a lot of green tea is that its cancer preventing effects appear to follow a dose response curve that has been experimentally observed up to six or seven cups a day, so drinking a lot of it can be worthwhile if that’s important to you. Green tea’s cancer-protecting mechanism is probably a body-wide up-regulation of apoptosis (programmed cell death) killing potentially cancerous cells earlier than otherwise. One minor worry with this (that I’ve never seen addressed in the literature which is more of an untrustworthy pet theory of mine) is that apoptosis up-regulation can presumably cause more neurons to die and apoptosis inhibiting mutations like BRCA1 have been suggested as leading to higher IQ. My guess is that there may be a trade-off here between raw biological longevity and high fluid intelligence.
Please define “a lot”; it’s subjective.
For my body, three liters a day counts as ‘a lot’, but I work heavily as well. It’s also a ‘goal level’ for work out periods, so it’s factored to keep in mind the fact that I don’t naturally want to drink that much. (Eg, that level is designed to buffer for the days I may forget or fail to do so)
I had to drink two full glasses of water a day for a bit more than a week when I was on antibiotics and noticed no effect except that I was really annoyed about having to drink that much water. Would the antibiotics have constituted a confounding factor if your hypothesis were true?
I wouldn’t describe anything I do as “working out”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water :
Either they are very large glasses, or you are not drinking even close to an appropriate amount of water.
I don’t drink water straight very often, but I eat plenty and drink lots of milk and some juice.
I would still think that two glasses is not enough of a swing. Periods of high water usage can drastically change how much our bodies require. After a single one hour workout, the recommended fluid replacement can be as high as forty six ounces for some body types and activity levels; that’s six glasses of water or well over a full liter bottle. Two glasses is comparatively microscopic. Antibiotics may also be confounding since they tend to come concurrently with other issues and could cause diarrhea.
I’d recommend picking up two one-liter bottles of Powerade* per day and using those as your drink gauge, in addition to your normal diet while you test. It’s actually fairly hard to overhydrate yourself except in extreme circumstances, and taking a sports drink should be extra protection. If you find a flavor you like, it can help turn a chore into something you...well something you at least don’t hate.
*Powerade contains more potassium than Gatorade and the same amount of sodium. Since most people have sodium in excess and are potassium deficient, Powerade is generally the better bet. Warning: that may be partial rationalization just because my local grocer tends to have it on sale for $0.50 a liter and I like the taste.
Ah, sorry. I missed that.
I second this advice. I have observed on myself quite a strong correlation between dehydration and headaches. Perhaps you should record how much have you drunk and when.