Hydration
I don’t know what to drink anymore. How should I hydrate?! I know that sounds silly, but I have all of these rules about what I drink. I try not to drink calories. I like something flavored. I’m not a huge fan of fizzy water. I don’t like to drink artificial sweeteners. I can’t drink caffeine after 5:30… On and on with the rules. The result is that I’m sneaking in little drinks here and there that are just packed with calories. Treat drinks like beers, creamy, sweet coffee, sangria or Long Island iced teas that you’re supposed to drink rarely, but I think to myself that I’ve worked out so it’s ok. But it’s definitely NOT ok! I don’t want the calories or the status as a lush!
I think that shifting away from beverages aside from diet soda and diet iced tea is making me pick up calories in drinks, and I know I’m eating when I want to be drinking sometimes. It’s funny how giving up something like aspartame and high fructose corn syrup in one, fowl swoop has thrown me for such a loop. You would think that drinking water would be the natural default, but I often find something to eat instead of pouring a glass of refreshing, zero-calorie water. It looks like this needs to be a very intentional goal and it looks like I really need to focus on it.
I was allowing one can of Coke Life per day- you know, the green can of Coke that is sweetened with stevia and cane sugar. Then Bradley and I started getting these headaches and neck aches. He thought something was seriously wrong with him and was doing massive research for this ‘problem’ that was persisting for months and found a correlation between stevia and spinal cord pain. We both dropped the stevia and felt almost instantly better. We both tried reintroducing it and each were rewarded with almost instantaneous head and neck aches so stevia is out for us. Water, water and more water is what my choice is!
Gigi and I decided to beat the heat and headed out for a run at 10:00 earlier this week. It seemed exceptionally hot and exhausting for that early in the morning. When we got home, I checked the temp and found out why we were so darn sweaty- 84 degrees before 11:00! We hopped into the pool as soon as we got home and felt much better. 😉