Numerous studies over the years have shown the many benefits of drinking water, the most prominent being the prevention or relief of dehydration and its insidious side effects. However, it is its purported efficacy in weight loss, or more importantly, fat loss, that causes people to closely re-examine its relationship with drinking water.
There is no doubt about the importance of water, especially when we consider that our body is made up of 40-65% water, depending on the composition of our body. The weight of fat is 18-26% water, while muscle is made up of approximately 72% water. So the more muscle we have, the more water there is in our body. Therefore, diets and activities that cause excessive fluid loss will have a significant effect on muscle size and therefore weight.
However, this weight loss, due to dehydration, should be viewed negatively due to the detrimental effect it has on athletic performance and metabolic functioning. In other words, dehydration negatively affects our body’s ability to burn calories in both the short and long term. It’s obvious how this is in the short term, but let’s examine the negative effects of dehydration on long-term metabolic function.
Due to dehydration, the body tries to store as much water as possible, most of it subcutaneously. This retained water becomes contaminated as your kidneys cannot filter the contaminants properly when you are dehydrated. The liver is then asked to help process and remove pollutants, which interferes with one of its other main functions, which is the breakdown of body fat. Therefore, without enough water in your body, you are likely to end up bloated and obese.
The obvious solution then is to stay properly hydrated, but many people are unaware of what that entails. The National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) recommends that the average adult consume 96 ounces of water per day. However, strenuous exercise and hot weather, which could require an additional 60 ounces of water intake, should be considered more.
Proper hydration has an additional thermogenic effect, burning up to an additional 100 calories a day. It improves the functions of the endocrine glands and the liver, increasing the percentage of fat used for energy. The short- and long-term benefits of hydration are a boon to our attempts to lose fat.