How much is enough water?

One school of thought says we should just drink when we’re thirsty; but we are designed to drink also for pleasure. In my opinion, that pleasure principle exists to make sure we drink more often than just when we are thirsty. Thirst is a sign that our water level needs topping up; so perhaps the pleasure principle is there to ensure that we forestall dehydration. We often drink when we are not thirsty–social and leisure situations are typical triggers, or when we fancy refreshment, such as a cup of tea. The instinct for refreshment is perhaps a timelier signal than thirst. If we act on it, we should never be thirsty.

It may be particularly inadvisable for a weight watcher to wait for thirst before drinking. Firstly, thirst can be confused with hunger and provoke calorie intake. Secondly, once we feel thirsty our body is in conservation mode, meaning that until we have slaked our thirst, we will be unable to lose weight. Weight watchers who make the mistake of relieving thirst with a calorific drink such as soda or milk risk weight gain by consuming calories at the very moment the body is geared by thirst to retain them. It would be a smart strategy for an athlete who needs to conserve energy but not for a weight watcher who needs to burn it.

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All I want to do is find ways to make maintenance go smoothly for me, and I believe water might be one of the keys.

I'm not saying that drinking more water will make a noticeable difference to weight management and health issues; but I believe it will make an unnoticeable difference. By which I mean that its chief effect will be to prevent bad things from happening; and we do not notice bad things that fail to happen. Since the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system is designed, among other things, to retain water and reinforce adipose tissue, it might be better for us never to switch it on, as we do when we raise our body sodium concentrations by eating too much salt or drinking too little fluid. Weight watchers who take care of water intake might avoid many of the weight gains and stalls that frustrate the progress of their chosen weight-management system. Any resulting smoother progress might not seem to do with water, however, but more like a run of luck.

If you have a job where it is inconvenient to keep peeing, or if you travel a lot, as I do, it is still possible to catch up on water intake once you get home. I keep a litre glass in the bathroom and down one of those first thing in the morning and another when I get in. These major glugs take care of a major portion of my water intake. Add in regular recreational and social drinks during the day and the fluid mounts up. I can drink in the evening up to a couple of hours before bed, the time it takes for most surplus fluid to leave the body.

When I am at home all day, I have a routine I call the triple wham. I drink a glass of water while I'm preparing a meal, a mug of green tea with the meal, and another glass of water when I clear up afterwards. Added to my dawn glass, those nine drinks plus the fluid in food meet my 4.5 litre target with little more ado.

That is a little over a gallon. I have been drinking half a gallon of water and all my other liquids. Think I will up water intake, now.

From what you said before, I am guessng you are fine. I mispoke in implying that I drink 4.5 litres every day; in fact, I only drink that much when I am eating salty food. This past few days I've mainly been eating fruit and veg, so I've been drinking less water. I expect 4.5 litres is probably overdoing it, so I need to experiment with how much fluid is enough for me. It should be easy to do the salted nut experiment with varying amounts of water intake and note the amount below which water starts being retained.

By the way, thanks for your comments earlier in the thread: they made me think. When you said that your husband lost weight though he was eating salted nuts, that gave me the idea for my salted nut experiment. It seems that you and he have a good balance between salt and water intake. It's become clear to me that salt is only a problem in the absence of adequate water. That's quite a find for me, because now I can eat more salty food, such as salted nuts, fish, and cheese, without paying dearly on the scale. Your comments in favour of salt prompted me to work this out.

Salt and weight

Why do we love salt? Because it tastes good. Why does it taste good? Because the body wants us to eat it. The body wants us to eat it because we evolved on the plains of Africa, where maintaining salt levels was crucial to survival. There can be too much of a good thing, however–a motto I'm sure no food-industry chief pins on his office wall.

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Until recently, my view of how water weight works was uninformed. I imagined that the body has a set sodium limit, which we reach after eating a certain amount of salt, and beyond which any excess is excreted. Someone who eats a lot of salt may carry a few extra pounds of water weight, I thought, but this makes no difference to their losing or maintaining true weight overall. It would be like carrying the same half-gallon can of water each time you weigh. I now realise salt-induced water-weight gain is not like that. Whether or not people gain water weight depends on the concentration of salt in their body at the time. If that is too high, they gain water weight, no matter what happened on previous days.

So someone who consumes little salt, or someone who consumes lots of salt but with enough water to dilute it, never gains salt-induced water weight, because the concentration of salt in their body remains optimal. However, someone who regularly consumes lots of salt without enough fluid will not only retain water but may gain body fat over time, since their body is locked in retentive mode, forced to conserve energy by suppressing the mobilisation of glucose and fat. The body does this because it believes it is under threat. If salt intake continues to exceed needs, the body will continue to retain more water.

This doesn't mean that high-salt eaters (in other words, most people on a standard modern diet) will end up carrying thirty pounds of empty water weight or more around with them; it means that, owing to not consuming enough fluid, they will carry the extra body fat that accumulates while salt is over-concentrated in their bodies. Slim people, who need less water than overweight people, may avoid this even if they eat a lot of salt, either because they eat modestly or because they burn more energy thanks to their faster metabolisms. In a sense, they offset potential water weight gain by lower energy intake or extra energy expenditure, as overweight people do when they diet. By reducing their size, overweight people lower the body’s set point for water retention. Therefore water is intimately involved in the process of weight reduction at every step.

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Walter Bortz gave an example of a patient whose weight loss stalled, despite a calorie deficit:

“In one obese individual, there was a period of 21 days in which no weight was lost whatsoever, despite an anticipated weight loss of 1.2 lb/day, calculated from a 4,200 calorie daily deficit. This period tested the patient’s determination and the doctor’s faith. The explanation for this protracted weight plateau in such an extremely obese individual was of course fluid retention. This was confirmed by observations of fluid and sodium balance.” (Bortz, Predictability of Weight Loss, 1968)

Though the patient’s weight loss resumed after their fluid and sodium balance was corrected, it would not have done so to the tune of an instant 25-lb weight drop, the amount of loss that had been forfeited. This is an extreme example; but it could be that many overweight people find themselves gaining or failing to lose weight for the same reason.

Bortz’s patient was lucky to have been under clinical observation, so that the issue was detected. But in normal circumstances you wouldn’t blame the individual for giving up. Overweight people are more vulnerable to the effect of water weight if they do not think to drink more water on account of being large. Which I doubt most of them do. I habitually drank the same amount of fluid when 70 lb overweight as I did once I was slim. If I’m typical, that could be one reason why losing weight seems so difficult, and why, despite sticking to plan, overweight people are prone to gain weight at the drop of a hat. It would be unsurprising if, as I did, they end up feeling irrational about the apparently random weight fluctuations that bedevil their progress.

In these circumstances, it might seem as if the body, by making us retain not only water but also fats and glucose, is conspiring against us; in fact, it is trying to help us. Our homeostatic system of salt and water balance evolved to protect us when we lived under the African sun. It makes sense that the body would conserve water and body mass when our ancestors overheated. It slowed down sweating, blocked urination, triggered thirst. And it used every trick in the book to protect us from losing weight.

Apparently, black people pee less rapidly than white, which is probably an evolutionary adaptation. Unfortunately, in the absence of copious water intake, that and related adaptations might makes them prone to weight gain, high blood pressure, and metabolic syndrome in a modern food environment, particularly in the hot conditions of the southern US states.

“Natural selection could have played a role in shaping racial differences in renal water handling and suggest that, in addition to enhanced urine concentrating ability, slower excretion of a water load could have conferred a selective advantage during the evolution of humans in the hot, arid climate of East Africa […] Because water is available only intermittently to hunter gatherers, slowing excretion of an acute water load could help to optimize water retention and improve reproductive success.” (Weder et al, Whites excrete water more rapidly than blacks, 2009)

I'm struck by how small the measures of drink are in hot countries. In Turkey, for example, they drink the smallest coffees imaginable. Coffees are not much bigger in Italy, where, nursing my litre of beer, I have also seen sweaty labourers nip into bars for a thimble of Stock brandy on their way home from work. I wonder if drinkers in these countries instinctively avoid large fluid intakes that would dilute the sodium in their systems? After all, in hot conditions, fluid retention is extremely desirable. By all accounts, early man consumed little salt, so a relatively small intake of water might have been enough to maintain sodium concentration in the right proportion. These days, however, most people eat so much salt that they need to drink large quantities of fluid to counteract it.

Did early man have constant high blood pressure because he was often short of liquids? I doubt it. I suspect he had normal blood pressure because he ate so little salt. Studies of modern hunter-gatherers show that they have excellent blood pressure and a low consumption of salt. Estimates of Palaeolithic man’s salt consumption are extremely low, maybe 500 mg a day or less. Consequently, he would not have needed to carry excess water weight, because he enjoyed sodium balance on a lower intake of water than we need today. High blood pressure results (among other things) from the constricting effect of the excess water weight that results from excess salt. In the absence of excess salt, I imagine early man enjoyed healthy blood pressure even when his consumption of fluids was low.

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It seems to me from all this that we have a choice. We can either consume a very low-sodium diet, in which case we may fare well on a relatively low intake of fluid. Or we can enjoy salty foods and offset them by drinking plenty of water. The worst thing we could do is eat salty foods while drinking too little fluid, the result of which will be water retention, and, if we are not careful, body-fat retention. Of course, we can vary how much fluid we consume each day, as I do now, according to how much salt we consume. We may eat carefully and drink to thirst at home; but if we dine out on restaurant food, with its notoriously high sodium content, it might pay us to drink a pint of water or two to prevent a jump in the scale the next day. The same if we choose to eat such salty foods as cheese, fish, salted nuts, sausages, and bacon.

I do not think it is that simple. I had increased my water intake (BTW, I am glad my notes let you have your salted peanuts back! LOL and my DH eats pistachios, not peanuts.) to experiment to see if I could lose a bit like you.

I weighed about the same for several days, then forgot to take my 1/2 tsp of salt through the day to stop my leg cramps and still drank my gallon of water +.

The next morning, AFTER a night filled with less sleep and jumping out of bed 4 times due to leg cramps, I weighed a pound less. I decided that pound was not worth it and am now back on my 1/2 tsp of salt that I took while I was drinking both about a gallon of fluids (water, coffee and sodas all combined) and a gallon of water+ coffee and whatever. An increase of over a quart of water.

So, for me, anyway, for now, it will be less water specifically, same amount of liquids before, and my 1/2 tsp of salt.

I think, as I said before, you've probably got it about right. Half a teaspoon of salt isn't much; it's excess salt intake that's weight-inducing, I believe. When I was experimenting with fish, I easily ate the equivalent of two and a half teaspoons of salt in the fish (weight gains guaranteed) per day, which puts your amount of salt into perspective. I don't think you could lose more true weight by drinking more water, as you are--at least with the added salt--likely in equilibrium; and low-carb diets tend to ensure low water weight, meaning that eventually there's none to lose. That said, I haven't experimented with whether high water intake has weight-loss effects other than those related to sodium balance.

Although I lost my weight with low-carb, I've never thought it was totally healthy, which is why I now eat more carbs. I don't think anyone who eats sufficient good carbs should get cramps, because they provide a natural balance of the electrolyte minerals: sodium, magnesium, potassium, and calcium. Calcium follows sodium and water out of the system.

However, I was on my way to eventual insulin and low carb has kept my glucose under control. I had cramps, not as bad as now, even before LC. I think, even then, I was not taking the minerals I needed, magnesium, salt, and the rest. And I salt a lot of foods as well.

Low-carb sounds as if it works extremely well for you. Health issues make a major difference to what works and what doesn't. I can tell from reading this site that where health issues come into it, nothing is straightforward. I am lucky that I don't seem to have ever had any diabetic symptoms, and this allows me to eat good carbs without issues. On low-carb, I never had cramps in the calves, but I had needling jolts in my fingers and toes, which I suspected were due to a shortage of potassium in my diet.

Bean experiment

Now that I do not eat bread or other floury foods, I need to know which staple carbohydrates I can eat. I've aways liked beans, and so, over a long period, I have been experimenting by occasionally eating nothing but beans for a day, plus butter and a couple of tablespoonfuls of a low-calorie sauce. This is part of a search for carbohydrate-rich foods that will not wreck my weight management.

I haven't counted the calories in the sauce, though there will be some. I make the basic sauce out of tomato paste, onion powder, and water, adding other herbs and spices as I like. These days, I do not cook with spices and herbs but only add them just before eating. One of the reasons is that I now practise light cooking (and I too easily burn herbs and spices).

After the first day, I kept cooking times for the beans relatively short compared to those recommended. I just rinse them and dump them with some water into my rice cooker and shove it in the microwave. Also, these days I do not soak them, and I eat them as cooked, drinking any cooking water too. In theory, by doing this I increase my chances of imbibing phytates and other antinutrients, of suffering gas, and of having vitamin and mineral absorption blocked. Anyone who has read this thread will know that those things do not bother me. I am happy if a food is less digestible, because I believe it means I will absorb fewer calories from it.

So my beans are more al dente than most people would enjoy. But I have developed a taste for chewy beans and nowadays do not like to eat them soft at all.

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Results

I decided to always consume 500g beans on each experiment day and 69g butter, bringing intake to around my daily maintenance requirement of 2000-2250 calories.

(Weight gain or loss to the right.)

289 carbs, 2133 calories pinto beans, slightly salted butter 0

(I did soak those overnight, exchanged water, cooked them well; but I suspected this served to increase their digestibility and available calories, so I abandoned the practice.)

282 carbs, 2158 calories green lentils, slightly salted butter -1lb

298 carbs, 2217 calories black-eyed beans, unsalted butter -1lb

315 carbs, 2129 calories adzuki beans, unsalted butter -0.25lb

316 carbs, 2233 calories black turtle beans, unsalted butter -0.75lb

247 carbs, 2018 calories Puy lentils, slightly salted butter 0

248 carbs, 2158 calories chickpeas (garbanzo), slightly salted butter +0.5lb

73 carbs, 1998 calories marrowfat peas, slightly salted butter -0.75lb

300 carbs, 2188 calories split peas, unsalted butter -0.5lb

Comments

Although these experiment days were not consecutive, the combined result adds up to a loss of 3.75lb over 9 days.

This means I can safely add dried legumes to my "magic" foods--foods I can rely on not to add weight for the calories, and which may even reduce weight.

The mechanism for this is probably similar, though less extreme in effect, to that for nuts. There are similarities between the two foods, but with beans it is a fraction of starch that (along with the fibre) resists digestion and thereby retains its calories.

Do beans induce wind? Not for me, in particular, but by now my digestive system is used to a high-fibre intake, and I think it is a question of adaptation.

Which were my favourite beans? I did like the black turtle beans. They produce an intense dark water which is supposed to be healthy to drink. Split peas and green lentils are very tasty too; but I liked all these legumes.

Apart from the last, which I did yesterday, these experiments were all completed before I developed my theories about salt. The results show a tendency for days on which I ate unsalted butter with the beans to be more loss-inducing than days on which I ate slightly salted butter. Didn't always have unsalted butter in the house--a situation that is unlikely to be the case again.

Staple food experiments

Beans were not the only staple food I looked into during my search for a replacement for bread in my diet. My experiments with potatoes are still going on, so I will come to them in a separate section. I also tried eating various wheat and grain products for a day at a time, mainly to record their effect on weight but also to test how enjoyable they are when eaten in a large quantity. I also tried eating bananas and crisps on a couple of days, to see if there was anything in the Resistant Starch theory--not that crisps are a staple food, of course.

I started these experiments when I was still on my weight-loss diet, so I kept calories below my gain-loss line of 1475 calories. In those days, I still ate some processed food. I used my more recent, maintenance figure of around 2100 calories on the last two days. I never added salt, except to the pearl barley.

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Weight gain or loss to the right

193 carbs, 1420 calories easy-cook brown rice, salted butter -0.25lb

123 carbs, 1144 calories pearl barley, salted butter, added salt +0.75

225 carbs, 1408 calories bulgur wheat, unsalted butter -0.5lb

354 carbs, 1450 calories bananas +0.25

255 carbs, 1450 calories buckwheat, unsalted butter -0.75lb

156 carbs, 1458 calories salted crisps (chips) +0.25

211 carbs, 1372 calories organic brown-rice spaghetti, unsalted butter -0.75lb

198 carbs, 1318 calories buckwheat noodles (soba: contains salt), unsalted butter -0.25lb

196 carbs, 783 calories brown rice, unsalted butter -1.5lb

187 carbs, 1333 calories whole-wheat spaghetti, unsalted butter -0.25lb

373 carbs, 2195 calories whole-wheat noodles (contain salt), unsalted butter -0.5lb

352 carbs, 2173 calories organic brown-rice pasta, unsalted butter +0.75

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Comments

These experiments were a lot of effort simply to rule out a few things. No lethal foods here; but no magic ones either. The days were spaced out over several months, during which I began questioning some central tenets of my low-carbohydrate diet. In eating mainly carbohydrates, to or just below my daily calorie requirement, I posed the question whether carbohydrates are more fattening for the calories than low-carb foods. I assumed they would be, and, to begin with, I feared gaining weight with such high-carbohydrate loads. In fact, the carbs turned out to behave much the same way as the proteins and fats in relation to their calories. In certain respects, this was a revelation: it helped lead me towards my present mixed diet, on which I often eat two or three hundred carbs a day. I'm not afraid of carbs any longer--at least, not of the mainly unprocessed ones I eat now.

What I am slightly afraid of, of course, is salt. Unfortunately, when I did most of these experiments, I had not formed my theories about salt, so I did not keep a very close record of it (these days I record every last jot of salt in my journal). Nonetheless, I did record salt to a point--and it is not impossible from the results that salt was implicated in some of the gains.

None of these foods impressed me much. I quite like brown rice and whole-wheat spaghetti, I suppose, and salty old soba was nice; but some of the items were frightful. Organic brown-rice pasta, I have to say, is as close to cardboard as a food can come. Noodles, even brown ones, have little substance and aren't filling to me. I will always keep a bag of brown rice in the cupboard, but, for my money, dried beans knock all the above into a cocked hat for texture and flavour. In addition, beans aren't processed, whereas pasta, noodles, rice, and grains are, even when they contain fibre. This processed characteristic makes them go down a little too fast, in my opinion. Beans are more substantial--especially if I throw a handful of seeds in the pan with them just before the end of cooking.

All very interesting, Plinge. I have to say, that I may not be able to go as high with carbs as you have, but reading your experiments has eased my fear about some things. I acutally had beans last week and still recorded a loss.
Thanks again for setting all this down for us.

Hi, Plinge. New fan here. Just discovered this thread. Have read it once over lightly. I've found in a lifetime of weight management that the one technique that always work is: being slightly to totally obsessive on the subject. So I consider you heroic. Your experiments are impressive.

I think I'm going to look into using nuts as a regular item. I love me some walnuts, and I can get 'em by the boatload at Costco. My problem is I can't quite get past the Religion of the Calorie. I've been a believer for so long!

In any case, your day-by-day records inspire me to be a bit more intentional in determining what foods, etc. are best for ME, not necessarily what the lists and ladders recommend. I tend to make too many changes at once, and thus fail to learn what did--or didn't--actually "work."

I've been LC for ten years--in maintenance most of that time. I've never exhibited any of the criteria for so-called "metabolic syndrome." So if LC works for me, and it seems to, there's some other reason. I'd kind of like to find out what that is.

Thanks for your thoughts and ideas.

I should think you live in pretty good bean country in that part of the States. We've been able to get all the different types of beans over here only fairly recently, and it's a new world for me. One of the mystic foods.

Hi, thanks for ploughing through my verbiage. But you are so right: obsession is slimming. I have eaten some very monotonous diets to test out theories; it's the fascination to record what happens that motivates me and stops me cheating. I'm not going to experiment for ever, though; once I have studied all the food groups I'd like to eat, I will go onto autopilot and put into practice what I have learned.



I can't get past the religion of the calorie either--and with good reason, because I think calories-in/calories-out holds, in principle. Calories are calories, even if they do not all meet the same fate in the body.



My theory is that low-carb is just more satisfying, so that it prevents an urge to binge. Even if we lose control and stuff ourselves on low-carb food, there's a limit to how far we can go before we have to stop. I was reading the other day about the peptide PYY. It responds to too much fat (and perhaps to too much protein) by making us not want to go on eating. Presumably this is because the body can only process so much of those intense macronutrients at a time. It's not so much talked about as leptin, because it can't be so easily manipulated. PYY-secreting zones are repositioned to help make gastric bypasses work; but this can simply cause nauseation. Maybe one reason low-carb works is because PYY secretion deters us from systematic overeating?

Lentils

In the past, when I ate lentils, I ate the red ones or the yellow ones, because they looked so colourful. They were also the ones mainly sold in the supermarket. But when I looked into lentils for my bean experiment, I found that the reason red and yellow lentils are that colour is that they have had their skins taken off.

So I chose to eat green lentils, which still have their skin on. (Brown lentils do also.) I prefer the big green lentils, though the small Puy lentils, also green, are regarded as finer. Lentils do not take much cooking. I like them al dente, with just a few skins sliding off, to show the yellow dal underneath, in a little butter and tomato sauce. For me, lentils taste more flavoursome with their skins; I think they contain more fibre and will be slightly less digestible, and therefore more calorie-retentive, than the skinned lentils. It's another tiny detail that I've learned.