How The Water You Drink Now Can Affect Your Preparedness

If you have been reading my blog posts for a while you already know that I don't consider emergency preparedness to be something that is outside daily life. 

I believe that in order for preparedness to really be useful, it must be integrated into your daily living. I mentioned a little about this on yesterday's post. I use one of my favorite preparedness phrases, "Store what you eat and eat what you store". If you do that your food storage will always be fresh during an emergency and you will save money on your food budget. That makes daily life better by making your preparedness a part of your daily life.

Water is even more important as a part of daily life than your food is. This applies to storage water as well, of course.

A great many health problems can be made worse by not drinking enough water every day. A surprising range of health problems are likely to be caused by dehydration as well. 

Here is a definition of the word, "dehydration", for readers who need it:

"Definition of DEHYDRATION

: the process of dehydrating; especially : an abnormal depletion of body fluids".

It comes from here: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dehydration

I have done a post entirely on the subject of health problems caused by dehydration and the need to drink more water. You can read it if you want to know more on the subject. This blog post is not intended to repeat that. 

If you do not take care of your health by drinking adequate amounts of water on a regular basis, you will not enjoy good health during an emergency. You probably already know from previous posts that health care is difficult or impossible to get during an emergency, because medical people will be very busy, their facilities will be damaged, and even getting to undamaged medical facilities will be difficult or impossible.

Your chances of making it through an emergency go up a lot if you are healthy when the emergency starts.

Once an emergency happens in your area, you will most likely be very busy. Even if you and your loved ones are not immediately affected by an emergency, you will probably need to help neighbors. 

You won't be much help to yourself and your loved ones during an emergency if you are in such bad physical condition that ordinary daily activities are a chore for you. It will be even worse if you have to do things like evacuate rapidly.

One of my favorite books says something about, "they shall run and not get tired". That would be very handy if you were trying to outrun a fire or tsunami, for example. You need to keep up with your water drinking as a part of your all-around health maintenance routine, so you can run and not get tired when it is necessary.

Part of the benefits of staying hydrated  is that it will maintain your health by cleaning out your system. If you don't flush your drains in your home once in a while you will get them clogged and need a plumber. The same is true of getting clogs in the systems of your body. Part of what helps to keep your "drains" clear in your body is drinking adequate water.

I hate counting stuff, keeping numbers in my head or writing them on paper. The way that I keep track of my daily water intake is by putting it into containers and separating those containers so that when the containers are empty, I know I have had a reasonable amount of water for the day.

I read about an easy method of calculation how much water to drink daily. You weigh yourself,  halve the amount on the scales and drink that amount of ounces each day to achieve a target water drinking goal. This is based on the  assumption that you are weighing yourself in American pounds of weight, and then can convert those into American ounces.

I don't know whether the same process will work for other weight and liquid measurement systems or not. You could check it by converting it online here: http://www.onlineconversion.com/

I hope this information helps you to become more prepared for emergencies and to stay that way as much as possible.