How Many Cups Of Water Do We Need Everyday?
How many cups of water do we need every day? Most people I meet
will answer that everyone needs at least 8 cups of water every day. But my
answer will be quite different. To answer this question, first of all, we have
to know how the drinking water is used by our body.
Based on Chinese Medicine, there are quite valuable ideas about water and how it is used by our body.
Let us first come to know about water in nature, water at room temperature is a colourless , transparent liquid , being obviously present in the rivers and lakes , but in addition, there are magnificent forms of water in nature, as you can see the rain, snow, fog , frost , cloud, ice , etc. how is water created in so many different forms? Actually , the water itself only goes downward by gravity , since water owns the characteristics of descending, penetration, cold, converging.
What is behind the magnificent changes of water in nature is sun light or heat from the sun. The sun's heat evaporates the water from the ocean , ground , rivers, forest, plains , evaporated water rises to the mountains and high in the sky and become ice and cloud. The ice on the mountain become the source of rivers and cloud can be changed to rain coming back to the ground. This is the real picture of water circulation in the nature. Our body is the same as the nature in terms of water circulation.
Water circulation and metabolic processes in the body are exactly
the same as in nature. The drinking water fall down the mouth,
esophagus to the stomach, then our
spleen and kidney energy evaporates the water and raises it to the lungs , then the lungs spread
them to nourish every cell of our body. Some of the water joins the digestive tract,
moistens the food and benefits absorption. Some unused water falls into the bladder
through the waterways and is temporarily stored up , this water can also be re-used
, but have to rely on the function of the kidneys gasification. If the water level
stored in the urinary bladder is too high, the water will be urinated out of
body. The spleen and kidney energy is the sun in our body to process the water.
Lets come back to the question in the first paragraph, how many cups of water we need every day?
My answer is that it really depends, if you are not thirsty you just follow your gut feeling, you don’t have to drink a lot. Some people may need more than 8 cups of water, such as people doing outdoor jobs in hot a summer time, people with physically challenging jobs, etc. on the contrary, people need much less water if they have an office job, or a less physically challenging job, etc.
Normally, water is easily processed in the
morning and mid-day, since our body energy is rising following the sun, so if
you feel thirsty, you can drink most of the water for the day before mid-day,
just like you water your plants before mid-day, the water will be used by the
plants most effectively.
Over drinking of water or more than you can process can sometimes cause water retention in the body, the retention places the limbs, joints, hypochondrium area, even stomach, lung, intestine, heart under pressure.
Disorders like swelling, body pain, joint pain, cough, dizziness, loss of weight, heart palpitation etc.
Once we have a correct diagnosis, the
treatment can be quite successful from acupuncture or Chinese herbal medicine, the
traditional acu-points as Taixi, Fuliu, Zhongwan, Qihai, Zusanli, Sanyinjiao,
the herbal formula as Ling Gui Zhu Gan Tang, Wu Ling San, Ze Xie Tang, etc.
