You know how important it is to drink water if you want to stay healthy. You also know what qualifies as good water – that is alkaline water free of pollutants. But most people still don’t drink enough water, if they drink any at all. Why?
The Challenges to Drinking Healthy
We have been programmed to believe that we are too busy to take proper care of ourselves. We have to rush here and there throughout the day and at night we are too tired to take the time. We have also been taught to want instant gratification over long-term benefits. So when we are hungry or thirsty, we just go for what is most convenient.
The biggest challenge to drinking enough water during the day is convenience. For most people, water isn’t exactly inconvenient. It’s piped into their house and all they have to do is turn on the faucet, but it’s polluted. That makes is very inconvenient because you have to do something about it.
When we are home, instead of drinking water we pull open the fridge and get something that is more convenient, like a can or bottle of soda. You can’t get much more convenient than that. You don’t have to get a glass because you can drink it straight from the packaging. All you have to do is grab, pop the top and drink. When you’re done you throw it away. Nothing to clean up afterward.
When away from home it goes pretty much the same way. If you are thirsty you stop at a convenience store to grab a can or bottle of something, or fill an oversized cheap plastic cup that you can take with you and drink on the go.
The second challenge is taste
Back to the tap water. It is convenient so why don’t people drink it? It’s polluted with a lot of chemicals, but so are the other drinks that people choose instead of water. The difference is the taste. Chlorinated water smells and tastes terrible. The canned and bottled beverages are heavily sweetened to cover the tastes of the chemicals added to them.
That’s really the challenge with taste – sugar. The convenient drinks (and foods too) are heavily sweetened which has conditioned us to only want things that taste sweet. We have become addicted to sweet. Water, for the most part, doesn’t taste sweet so we skip the water in favor of some sweetened drink that we have been conditioned to think tastes better.
How to Drink More Water
I’m not going to suggest that you put sugar in your water. While that would still be better than drinking soft drinks, it would degrade some of the health benefits. Getting rid of the chlorine and other chemicals added to water will do a lot for making your water taste better. A simple carbon filter can get rid of the chlorine while a better water filter will further condition your water so that it can taste very good.
My experience has shows me that if you stop drinking the sweetened drinks in favor of filtered alkaline water for a month, those sweetened drinks will stop tasting so good. You’ll be able to taste the chemicals that the sugar can’t quite mask, and they taste terrible. I haven’t had a cola in better than ten years because they taste awful, and my father has worked for both Coke and Pepsi at one time or another, so used to drink them a lot.
That leaves the issue of convenience, which is a little bit more of a challenge because we are talking about filtering what we drink. There are two areas to address for convenience – at home and away from home. At home I use a water filter with a large enough capacity that there is always filtered water available when I want it. Ideally the capacity is large enough that you can use the filtered water for your cooking too.
A filtered water bottle will work for when you are not home. With a filtered water bottle, you can fill it up at any drinking fountain and have your clean alkaline water any time that you need it. If you can’t find a free source of water then buy a bottle of water and pour it into your filtered water bottle. The filter will remove the chemicals from the plastic and condition the water so that it is alkaline and tastes good.
All of my water filters, the ones for home and my filtered water bottle, come from Nikken. I use both the PiMag Waterfall and the older Aqua Pour at home and the PiMag sport bottle when I’m away. They filter out most of the common contaminants that are in “potable” water and leave the water alkaline and great tasting. Of course there are other filtration systems available. The Nikken PiMag systems do a great job at a very reasonable cost. Check them out.
Ben
Disclosure: I am an independent Nikken distributor so I may earn a commission if you place an order through the links above. Nikken’s water filters are only available through independent distributors.
Nikken Filtered Water Bottle