Has Your Body Forgotten to Drink Water?
Submitted by Unity Home Fitness Blog
Are you interested in discovering how your body can “forget” that you are thirsty and “think” that you are hungry, if you don’t drink enough water?
In a prior post, Are You Thirsty for a Better Body?, I wrote about my creative, yet low-calorie way to drink water without it being boring. I had also briefly mentioned how our bodies can get confused between the hunger and the thirst signal.
I had someone recently comment that they were looking for more information on that topic, so I found the book I had on that, and here is an excerpt from the book:
The body has an ability to adapt to some hardship. Low food intake and temporary shortage of water in the body seem to invoke an adaptive process. The essential functions of the body are managed until we have access to food and water. In this process, the sensation of thirst can be confused with the feeling of hunger, because both sensations are similar in the way they register-they stem from low energy levels in the brain. This is one of the main contributing factors in the development of obesity in the young and the old. They mistakenly eat food to satisfy their thirst sensation.
They seem to respond to both calls-thirst and hunger-as if they are only hungry. They begin to eat until the thirst sensation gathers greater strength as a result of the additional load of solid food within the system, and only then do they drink some water. This type of thirst satisfaction is not enough for the urgent needs of the body, but is just enough to fall inside the body’s limit of temporary adaptation to water shortage. In this way, the water shortage in the body becomes a steadily expanding chronic state, and new thresholds of adaptation are forced on the body. This process results in a slowly deteriorating loss of thirst sensation, so much so that the need for regular water intake as a sensation gradually becomes forgotten.
