I recently posted on Instagram that I was doing a watermelon fast to get more hydrated and many of you jumped on the post and talked about how de-hydrated you have been feeling. So I wanted to highlight not only how important winter hydration is, but to also pay attention to the signs that you are not hydrated! If you feel constant hunger, have a parched mouth, or dry itchy “winter” skin or chapped lips, you may be quite dehydrated already. Our thirst is not a good indicator for how much hydration we need. By the time we register thirst, we are already pretty dehydrated.
Here are ten quick tips on staying hydrated in the winter – and no, drinking 8 glasses of water is not one of them!
- Eat Lots of Fruits & Veggies With High Water Content, like cucumbers. But you also want to add foods that have a high silica content to your diet. These include melons, artichokes, asparagus, Lemon balm, dandelion, nettles & rose hips. Adding in enough of these foods and herbs will ensure that you have enough silica to help you hydrate your cells and skin. Adding in a lot of cucumbers and cucumber juice also helps to flush the liver out. Also a very important point that Anthony William, Medical Medium has brought to us in his new book Life Changing Foods is the idea of two types of water in our produce – hydrobioactive water and cofactor water. These different types of water along with infusion of minerals and phytochemical is what makes our water living. And eating lots fresh fruits and veggies ensures that we will remain well hydrated without needing to drink a ton of plain water.
- Drinking Plenty of Living Water. What is living water, you ask? Water becomes living based on the structure of water molecules in it. Living Water with good natural structure (found in spring water, breast milk, fresh fruits and vegetables, for example), is very hydrating to our cells. If you do not have a clean spring water source you can get your water from, you can always find bottled spring water. Good sources are bottled in glass and are from true springs, like Mountain Valley Spring Water, Voss, Mount Shasta Spring Water and others I always happen to find when visiting local stores when I travel. If you cannot get any such water, its easy to make your water living by adding slices of cucumbers, lemons, limes, oranges, grapefruit, apples, mint, cilantro or any other fruit or herb of your liking.
- Drink living water upon waking. In any season, after good night’s sleep, we wake up dehydrated. This is especially true in the winter. Upon waking drink a tall glass of lemon water (which by virtue of the lemon, becomes living water) and if you follow it up with a fresh juice, like celery, cucumber or any other fruit nectar, you will immediately send lots of absorbable hydration to your cells.
- Add Aloe To Your Diet. Its high in some pretty cool nutrients – what Medical Medium calls medicinal alloys. Doesn’t that sound fascinating? Well we know from historic use, since aloe is an ancient plant, that it is great for the skin topically, but it is also even more amazing for the skin when taken internally.
- Add a Silica Supplement – like Orgono Living Silica or MegaHydrate by Phi Sciences. Silica supplements are for those who have chronically dry, itchy skin or any kind of problem skin that becomes way worse in the winter. This helps to restore hydration to the skin from the inside out.
- Add a high-quality Omega 3 supplement. Good amounts of essential fatty acids like EPA, DHA , ALA or even chia seeds are really helpful in quenching the feeling of thirst in the winter. A supplement like Omega Zen by Nutru is a high quality vegan omega 3, which are extracted from algae (not fish). This along with the other suggestions here, can help you feeling very comfortable in the winter.
- Use a Humidifier (to prevent mold use a UV light one, not a filter based one), to help add moisture to dry heated rooms. This can help you feel more comfortable with your skin, prevent too much dryness in nasal and sinus passages and eyes, and help you breathe more easily. In turn, this stops you from drying out too much due to the ongoing heat in the winter.
- Use an essential oil diffuser which uses water to diffuse oils. Essential oils are amazing for infusing the air with healing and moisture from the diffuser. Essential oils especially the ones for helping the sinuses and breathing can help you maintain the health of the delicate nasal and sinus cavities as well as in the trachea and bronchioles in the lungs. Here are oils that work best to infuse into dry heated winter rooms: eucalyptus, rosemary, inula, oregano and lemon myrtle, Marjoram, frankincense, black spruce, chamomile, niaouli and peppermint. Any blend of these oils works. Find something you are intuitively drawn to, and go from there. You could also purchase blends like Deep Breathing Blend or Lungevity.
- Eat honey. If you don’t have a lot of honey in your diet anyway, now would be a good time to add that in. Honey is highly anti-microbial and also super hydrating to the cells of your body, but actually dehydrates microbes and that is how it kills them. Honey also contains living water, like fresh fruits and vegetables do as well. Living water
- Drink plenty of warm herbal teas. Many herbs like nettles, oatstraw, horsetail etc. are super high in silica (am I sounding like a broken record yet??). The more ways in which we can get silica into our bodies during the winter, the more hydrated we will remain in our cells and avoid the winter discomfort of dryness in every area affected. But even herbs that are not super high in silica are great, like red clover, lemon balm, licorice root, red raspberry leaf, peppermint etc. Teas are a great way to hydrate in the winter, as they warm us up at the same time.
Adequate hydration is important to continue the healing process, to keep off extra winter weight and to keep us feeling comfortable. Most of us are chronically dehydrated, so when winter rolls up, we become even MORE dehydrated and start to acutely feel the impact of that dehydration. If you start these practices in the winter, aim to continue them into the other seasons, as they help the body’s hydration levels and also allow you to detoxify better. I trust that by implementing some of these strategies, you will be well on your way to great hydration and great health.
Leave a comment below on how you feel after trying some of these tips. Or share some cool tips of your own! I look forward to reading them.
