Many of the clients I work with come in with disc degeneration, arthritis or bone on bone in the joints. Excessive wearing on joints due to bad bone alignment and dysfunctional muscles that are not balanced is the cause of these issues. But another piece of the puzzle that can affect the healing process is the lack of water to these joints due to dehydration.
When people think dehydration they think heat stroke or some major catastrophe. That is not always the case. Dehydration can take on many forms. Things as minor as chapped lips, dry skin or headaches can be signs of dehydration.
Up to 60% of your body is made of water. It makes common sense that drinking water is good for your body. How much water is often debated, but drinking water is good. I recommend that my clients try and drink a gallon a day.
Water makes up the majority of lubricant in your joints. When you are dehydrated your body steals water from non-life sustaining areas and pulls them to the important areas such as heart, brain and liver. If you are chronically just a little dehydrated over a long period of time, it can create a negative effect on the body. This chronic dehydration doesn’t expose itself until years have passed.
If one day you are out in the sun and you become dehydrated, you usually feel the affects quickly and know there is something wrong. If you are a little dehydrated throughout a normal day and ignore the small warning signs and this happens over many years, the problems don’t appear till later in life. Then you have no idea where they came from.
Water is also an essential element to healing chronic pain. When your body is in motion, it acts like a pumping mechanism. When you are not in motion the human body has systems in place that keep the pump activated at a minimum. Body motion speeds the pump up to help distribute necessary healing elements.
Cartilage in the spine and joints need water to thrive. I’m a big believer that cartilage can grow back. But it must have a source to draw from. As water in a pond evaporates and soaks into the ground, it would go dry unless there is a source that is refilling it. The human body’s water source is when we drink it. We do gain some from certain kinds of foods, but the majority comes from drinking it.
You may feel like when you go to the bathroom your peeing out all the water you drank. But that is not true. You are peeing out some of the water but the body has pulled from the water the necessary elements it needs.
You have to drink water consistently throughout the day. When you drink a big glass of water, all at once, the body doesn’t handle it well. If you take little drinks throughout the day the body soaks it in.
An example of this is when it rains. If it rains a little over a long period the ground can soak it in and will benefit better from it. But if it rains a lot in a short period of time, the water runs off and away from where it is needed most. The same thing happens to the body.
In order for good overall health, you need to drink plenty of water. Think of walking to the bathroom as apart of your daily exercise routine.