Dehydration: Big Impact On Performance

If you are looking to perform your best in sport or in exercise, you have to keep your body hydrated throughout the activity. Sweating even as low as one percent of your total body weight can place unneeded stress on your cardiovascular system, and losing more than one percent can impair your physical performance. Sweating causes your blood to become more viscus forcing your heart to work harder in its efforts to provide working muscles with oxygen and fuel. Dehydration can also affect mental sharpness and hand-eye coordination, which can put you in a disadvantage in mentally strenuous activities and competitions.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) recommends there guidelines for keeping your body hydrated for physical activity:

• Bef ore Physical Activity: Drink at least 16 ounces of fluid about two hours beforehand.
• During Activity: Drink 5 to 10 ounces every 15 to 20 minutes.
• After Activity: Drink 16 ounces for each pound of body weight lost during activity.

Water and Weight Loss

Can water help me lose weight?

The answer is yes.

Water can help your body digest food, and also deceive it into thinking that its full.

Water and digestion
Before being distributed to the rest of your body for usage or storage, most of your food is temporarily stored in your stomach. Like food, most of the ingested water is also temporarily stored in your stomach. This food/water mixture together forms a great partnership. The water helps separate the food particles causing them to become more dispersed and spread out. This helps increase the efficiency of absorption.

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Water and weight loss
As you know, your stomach is a temporary storage bin. Like a storage bin, your stomach reaches a fill point. At this point your stomach sends a signal to your brain letting it know that it has reached capacity. The sensation of being hungry then disappears.

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Now that you are aware of this negative feedback mechanism, how can it help me lose weight. Again, this brings us back to the great partnership that food and water form with each other. As you may already know, water contains zero calories. This is important, because drinking water with your meal can result in you eating less food. Instead of solely eating, which plays a significant role is the amount of calories you consume, you are also ingesting water, which contains zero calories. What is happening is that you are replacing some of the food that you would normally intake, with calorie-free water. This will result in you consuming less food and less calories. In the long run, consuming less food and less calories will result in weight loss.