Summer will be here before we know it. With it comes hot weather, more sweat and a higher chance of becoming dehydrated. Whether you’re hitting the gym, working from home or soaking up the sun, staying hydrated plays a bigger role in your health than you might think. So what’s the right number to follow? Eight glasses a day? Half your body weight in ounces? What if you get bored with the taste of regular water? Do you add chia seeds? We talked to a registered dietitian to figure out how much water you need to stay hydrated this summer.
“The 8×8 rule can be a bit oversimplified for some, but it’s also not necessarily dangerous,” says Renee Fitton, registered dietitian and director of education at L-Nutra, a nutrition technology company. Instead of depending on exact guidelines for your water goals, you should use simple, daily habits to add more water into your routine.
How much water should you drink each day?
Fitton says various factors affect how much water one needs daily, including body size, medications, gender, physical activity, climate, health status and altitude.
Most of us are also familiar with the old adage: Drink eight glasses of water at 8 ounces daily. The eight-by-eight rule guides us to drink 64 ounces (about 1.9 liters) of water each day. Many of us have blindly followed this advice for our entire lives, not knowing where it came from or why we need eight glasses of water.
