Water is essential for life, and your body needs it to function properly. Dehydration occurs when your body loses more fluids than it takes in. Yet, you lose fluids naturally through everyday activities and body functions. Therefore, it’s essential to stay hydrated to help maintain optimal health.
The Importance of Staying Hydrated
Being hydrated lets your body function properly. Water helps regulate your metabolic processes, balance electrolytes, and aid digestion. It also maintains an optimal body temperature and is a lubricant for your internal organs and joints. Conversely, dehydration can interfere with your body’s ability to regulate.
Research suggests that people’s bodies contain different percentages of water. For example, a baby’s body is about 78% water, which drops to about 65% by age 1. Adult men are about 60% water, while women are about 55%.
Fat tissue does not have as much water as lean tissue. Therefore, babies and kids tend to have more water as a percentage of their bodies than adults. Moreover, women have less water than men, and people with more body fat have less water as a percentage than those closer to their ideal weight.
Typically, you rehydrate by eating food and drinking water. Unfortunately, most people do not rehydrate consistently. As a result, there are a lot of people who might be dehydrated and not realize it.
How Does Your Body Lose Fluids?
Your body loses fluids in many ways. For example, you lose water through sweating, breathing, and urinating. You can lose more fluids from heat, burns, disease, medications, vomiting, and diarrhea. Furthermore, factors such as environmental conditions, level of physical activity, dietary intake, and age can affect fluid loss.
When you start to become dehydrated, you may feel thirsty. Your thirst sensation is triggered if the body loses between 1 and 2% of its water. Therefore, you should drink water to rehydrate. Otherwise, you may begin to feel the effects of dehydration.
How Much Water Do You Need?
You may have heard that everyone should drink eight glasses of water daily. Although that advice is reasonable, it does not consider your specific needs. In fact, factors such as body weight, pregnancy, assigned sex at birth, activity level, and diet can affect the amount of water needed. You can estimate how much water you need using the Water Intake and Hydration Calculator above.
Mild Dehydration
Mild dehydration is when you lose roughly 3% of your body weight in fluids. You’ve likely experienced symptoms of mild dehydration before. These include thirst, dry mouth, fatigue, headache, dizziness, constipation, or golden-colored urine.
Furthermore, mild dehydration can affect short-term memory, alertness, concentration, and performance. It can also make you more susceptible to changes in mood and feelings of fatigue, negative thoughts, anger, or confusion.
Not only does dehydration affect your mind, it can affect your energy levels. Mild dehydration can impair your exercise performance due to increased body temperature and heart rate because your heart has to work harder. As a result, you feel more fatigued, reducing your motivation and endurance.
Thankfully, these effects can easily be fixed by taking in fluids. You can expect to feel better within a few hours after drinking water.
Moderate Dehydration
Moderate dehydration occurs when you lose between 4 and 8% of your body weight in fluids. It can be caused by several factors, such as vomiting, diarrhea, excessive sweating, or simply not drinking enough water.
Unfortunately, as you continue to become more dehydrated, you could experience more extreme symptoms of mild dehydration and other symptoms such as muscle cramps, dark-colored urine, increased heart rate, low blood pressure, sunken eyes, and rapid breathing.
You may be able to rehydrate by drinking water. However, it may take longer. If you aren’t feeling better, contact your doctor.
Severe Dehydration
Severe dehydration occurs when you have lost more than 9% of your body weight in fluids. At this point, your dehydration may be dangerous. You should drink fluids and seek medical attention immediately since symptoms can be life-threatening.
If you are diagnosed with severe dehydration, you will likely be given fluids through an IV, which will help quickly rehydrate your body. In some cases, you may also be given electrolytes. Electrolytes are minerals that help your body regulate its fluid levels.
Once you have been rehydrated, you must continue drinking plenty of fluids to prevent dehydration from happening again. Also, it would be best if you avoid activities that can cause you to lose fluids, such as exercising, going out in hot weather, or drinking alcohol.
If you have a chronic condition that makes you more likely to become dehydrated, like diabetes or kidney disease, then you should talk to your doctor about ways to prevent dehydration. They may recommend drinking more fluids than usual or fluids containing electrolytes.
What Should You Do If You Are Dehydrated
First, it’s vital to determine how dehydrated you are. You should immediately see a doctor if you’re dizzy, confused, tired, or can’t keep fluids down. A doctor may give you IV fluids if your dehydration is severe enough.
If you have mild dehydration, drink water. In fact, you should drink water gradually throughout the day. Too much water at once may increase your risk of hyponatremia, which occurs when the electrolytes in your body become depleted. Unfortunately, hyponatremia may be life-threatening, and you should seek medical attention.
Tips to Prevent Dehydration
- Drink plenty of fluids
- Drink fluids before, during, and after exercise
- Eat foods high in water content, such as fruits and vegetables
- Avoid caffeine and alcohol
- If you are thirsty, tired, lightheaded, or have a headache, drink water and see if your symptoms improve.
- Keep a water bottle with you at all times
- Set a reminder to drink water
- If you don’t like the taste of plain water, then try adding a slice of lemon, lime, or cucumber.
- Get plenty of sleep so your body can regulate its fluids better
The Takeaway
Water helps manage your body’s processes, aids digestion, regulates body temperature, and acts as a lubricant for your internal organs and joints. Dehydration interferes with your body’s ability to regulate. Therefore, you should drink enough fluids to stay hydrated and watch for signs of dehydration. If you become too dehydrated, then you’ll need medical intervention such as IV fluids to hydrate you.
It would help if you tried to form a good habit of drinking water throughout the day. If you are concerned about dehydration, talk to your doctor. They can help determine your water needs and provide other tips for preventing dehydration.
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Disclaimer: No content on this site should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
