Health Wellness Hydration Podcast Episode 61
Show Notes and Transcript for Health Wellness Hydration Podcast Episode 61 of the Style and Stewardship Podcast:
How to take preventative measures in your wellness. Learning what works for your body and how it performs best is so beneficial. There is always so much to learn and we can all be our own wellness advocates. I encourage you to be your own health and wellness advocate. I want you to feel your best so you can steward your health on purpose. In this episode we cover:
- Health Stewardship
- Minerals, Vitamins, and More
I hope this episode challenges and encourages you wherever you may be in your wellness, weight loss, health, fitness journey, etc.
Other episodes to encourage, inspire, or challenge you:
Ep 54 Wellness Over Weight Loss Focusing on What Matters Most
Ep 57 Holistic Nutrition and Wellness
Ep 56 Balance and Helping Others Get Healthy
Ep 53 – Food is Fuel, Stewarding Health and Wellness
Ep 41 – What Stewarding Looks Like From a Different Perspective (My Husband shares)
Ep 21 – Focus Forward
Ep 22 – Take the Doubts With You and Keep Going Until He Tells You to Stop
Wellness Ep 20
Stewarding Wellness an Easy Meal Planning Method Ep 43
Wellness Stewardship Revisited -Ep Bonus
Sign up for the free “Steward on Purpose” workbook here
Listen Here:
Style and Stewardship Podcast Episode 61 Transcript
As stewards and responsible stewards, it’s so important that we manage every area that matters most. And the areas that affect how much we can impact this world really rely on how we approach the different resources that God has given us to manage. First up, medical disclaimer.
If you are experiencing any health conditions or concerns, please consult a medical professional. Nothing on this podcast or Blog is to treat, cure or diagnose any medical condition that you may have. Always, always seek a Doctor or medical professional. You can read the full disclaimer here
Okay. I just wanted to put that out there. As someone who is always trying to encourage you to be your own health and wellness advocate and to advocate for your own wellness to understand your body, what helps it to perform well?
What helps you to feel well? What helps you to be? Well, I. Am definitely a student. I am a student of nutrition. I am a student of my own body in learning what works best for me. And a couple of months ago I was experiencing some things that were kind of concerning. I was like, what’s, what’s happening here.
And I had to pull my textbooks out, literal textbooks, and begin, to learn what may be going on in my body. This is what I did personally. I’m not suggesting that you do this, but I am suggesting that you take note of how you feel and what’s normal for you. And what’s not. Get a baseline of where your numbers are when it comes to your blood work.
When it comes to all the different panels that we can have done. Typically this happens at a wellness visit. Every year I was experiencing this shaky jitteriness, I was craving sugar, like crazy. if you’ve listened to the first wellness episode that I did on the style and stewardship podcast, I’ll link it.
But I basically shared one of the things that run in my family. And when something runs in your family, it does not mean that you are destined to get it, but it does mean that you are prone to it. If you are exposed to some of the same. Catalysts, honestly, for some of these conditions, then we are more susceptible.
Some of us are more susceptible to certain things than others when it comes to, you know, what runs in my family is type two diabetes, and this is something that can be encouraged. To happen. if you have a poor diet, if you have a diet that’s high and, and, you know, refined carbohydrates, lots of packaged things, lots of fast food, you know, deep frying things.
Having shortening, vegetable shortening, a lot of these things can truly be encouraged to happen if you are already susceptible to them. So there are certain foods that I avoid. And there are certain foods that I tend to eat less of, but whenever I’m craving certain things and I’m not feeling great, this is what I always circle back to. Because this is one of the things that I would like to avoid getting Lord willing.
And as I educate myself and as I learn about this, I try to avoid these things. So I want, I like. Take preventative measures as opposed to waiting for something to happen, which is why I’m always tweaking my diet. I’m always tweaking my family’s diet. You can ask my husband a lot of times he’s like, okay, what are we doing this week?
What are we trying this week? Because I want us to feel as well as we possibly can. And I want us to be as well as we possibly can. And, we are all gonna get sick. It happens to all of us, but I truly believe that heredity is only one portion of our health. What we do to encourage or discourage certain conditions is on us.
Other Episodes
And I truly believe that this is not about condemnation and this is certainly none of us are gonna do this. Perfect. So one of the things that I was experiencing, and if you are eating, I’m gonna go ahead and, and, and give you a moment. you might not wanna listen to this episode while you’re eating. So that’s another disclaimer.
So I’m gonna go ahead now. I was experiencing shaky jitteriness. I was really, really having high cravings for sugar and, and even salt. And I was like, what is going on? I was really thirsty, but I was drinking a ton of water because I always drank a ton of water and I just thought, okay, you know, Maybe I, I, I couldn’t figure out why I was feeling the way that I was feeling.
So I started looking at what I was eating on a regular basis, and this is a great starting point for anyone. And this is, if you don’t know why you’re feeling the way that you’re feeling, you have to do some investigation. You’re not just going to figure it out unless you can see correlations between things or see.
Things that you haven’t necessarily been eating. I can tell a huge since we eat most of the food that we eat, I cook all of it. So a lot of, we don’t eat a ton of packaged foods as far as highly processed ones. So as I, I’m eating like more of this or more of that I can typically pinpoint where something, where triggers lie for me, if I’m eating, you know, more fast food, or if I’m I like French fries, I’m just gonna say it is, it is.
If I were superhuman. French fries are my kryptonite and chips and salsa. I’m just gonna put that out there. I don’t know what chores are. Can you relate to that? Like French fries? It’s rare that I will turn French fries down. I, I just, wow. I love them. So I, I can, you know, I have a record of what affects me and I think that it’s really important that you get to that place where you see, okay.
I mainly eat. You know, whole foods or, or fresh food or whatever, and start taking note of when you start eating foods that aren’t typical for you and how your body responds to those things because you can get a lot of information. And that is one of the ways that we can be our own health advocates.
Because we need to know our bodies better than anybody else because we’re the only ones walking around in our bodies. So we should be, you know, intimately aware of the differences in the expression that our health is showing symptoms and whatnot. Keeping this in mind, the whole type two diabetes thing.
Pin It!
I decided you know what? I am going to purchase a glucometer. If you’re unfamiliar with what, that is diabetics typically get this little digital device and it comes with these things called lancets, and a, you know, it comes with these sterile little needle heads basically. And you put it inside of this little.
Pin looking thing and, that’s the medical term for it. I’m kidding. You put these little sterile needles in there. You screw the top off and you prick your finger. You do this at a fasted state. So overnight the first thing in the morning, you have a little bit of water. If you want or nothing at all.
And you prick your finger. You’re, it’s gonna produce a little drop little blood you’re then gonna place the Lancet in this device. And then you, you know, you put it on your finger, and then it gives you a digital reading. Of your blood glucose. And that is literally how much glucose or sugar quote unquote, the form of sugar that’s being glucose is in your blood at that given moment.
And if it is a certain amount, it can show. you know, whether or not you need to go to the doctor and figure out what else is going on in your body. If you are in the quote-unquote normal range. So I did this and I did this for two weeks and I just wanna say hats off to people who have to regularly prick their fingers.
My fingers were both numb and extremely sore for quite some time. Even if I used a different finger, my fingers were achy. After doing this for a while, I got a picture of what my normal baseline was. I did this throughout the day. I did this two hours after a meal and I did this when I was, you know, in the morning fasted and right before bed.
So I did this about three to four times per day because I wanted to see what my normal range was as far as blood glucose. And what was normal in general, as far as diabetes prediabetes or the normal range. As I did this, I found that I did not have issues there. Thank God, but I wanted to go a step further.
So I got labs done last week and I got blood work, done urinalysis, and all of those things because one of the signs of diabetes or prediabetes is frequent urination and lightheadedness, dizziness, craving sugar, and feeling like, your blood sugar is rising and falling rapidly. Mind you, this can happen to any of us.
If we get spikes because we’ve had too much sugar, this can happen to any one of us, but when it happens for prolonged, periods of time, and your normal is now this constant blood sugar spike and fall. That’s when we start seeing, okay, there’s a, there’s an issue going on with how my body is using sugars and how insulin and how the insulin response, which, is what the cells use to take in sugar.
It [insulin] is created by the pancreas and literally brings sugar into the cell for energy because that is the body’s preferred form of energy through the form of glucose. It’s why, when people do things like keto, they try to get their body in ketosis to run off a different energy source, which they try to get the body to use fat.
It’s basically manipulating the body to use something other than what the body typically uses. That’s not what we’re talking about here, but I just kind of wanted to throw that in there in case you were ever wondering, what is keto. Keto acidosis is something that happens to diabetics, which is completely different, but I’m gonna get into that in another episode.
What I wanted to share today is my personal experience. When I got my numbers back, what I found was really interesting. Thank God. My A1C was completely normal. My blood glucose was completely normal. They took blood and all of those things. I was shocked by some other things though. And it was my body’s level of hydration, which was pretty shocking to me.
When we think, oh, you know, I am going to, I drink a ton of water. I think I’ve already said that I drink a ton of water. And first thing in the morning, what I like to do is to drink a really big cup of water, because I know that I’m about to have a really big cup of coffee. So knowing that coffee is a diuretic, I think, all right, you know, I’m going to drink a big cup of water before I have coffee.
So obviously I’m gonna run to the bathroom a lot. Right? That seems normal. But this was something that was happening throughout the day. So it’s like once I got up in the morning, I was immediately having to use the restroom in the middle of the night, constantly having to use the restroom. This is way too much information for some of you you’re welcome, lol.
But this is about health and we all do this, right? So I just wanted to, I wanted to see what my numbers were. I wanted to see what my baseline was. And I’m constantly saying this to you and encouraging you to do this.
Knowing where you start is extremely important because you don’t know if you are promoting your own health and wellness or not. If you don’t know where you’re starting from.
Style and stewardship
You have to know what is normal or typical for your body. This is why it’s important to go to the doctor and have those yearly wellness checks so that, you know, what is normal for you. Also with the information of what is hereditary, what runs in your family, or what traditionally has been many of the health concerns that are running your family or disease conditions.
So as I’m doing this, I’m like, oh my goodness. You know, I’m constantly thirsty, but I’m constantly drinking water. And it occurred to me after I pulled out my textbooks and I mean, my literal textbooks, and I had to do a little bit of digging. So I got my numbers back. I saw where I stood. I saw that things were normal except for this area of sodium.
And I was thinking, why, why, why is this? This is shocking, you know? And I made the correlation after reading some things about it. Water balance, water balance in your body is something your body is constantly trying to get water into the cell. And obviously, you’re also excreting water throughout the day.
But what’s fascinating, and what I found, and I hope that this can be a help to you is that I was drinking filtered water. So filtered water is great because you know, the water is being literally filtered from pathogens and things that can be harmful to us. And that is a great thing.
However, just like when we take antibiotics, those antibiotics are killing bad strains of bacteria, but we all know this now, but it’s not discriminate. It is also killing the good strains of bacteria. Our water system is very much like this.
I thank God for the sanitation that we have because we are avoiding a lot of the pathogens that people in other countries who don’t have clean water don’t experience!
And this is amazing!
However, what we’re also stripping from the water when we’re filtering is all of the minerals that are necessary for your body to keep the water balanced. The water that we take in has to have minerals, the food that we have, you know, we eat has some minerals in it, depending on what it is.
But if we’re just drinking water, water, water, water, I mean, I thought I was doing such a great job because I’m like, I’m going to the restroom and, and it’s virtually clear, you know, and I thought this is awesome.
This is awesome. I’m hydrated. Even my son would say, you know, I, I got him trained to, to look at that. And I think that you should, you should recognize what’s normal and what’s not normal. And what it should look like. And I thought I was doing such a great job.
However, as I’m drinking water and constantly flushing it through and not putting minerals in guess what I’m doing, I’m flushing my body of minerals and I’m creating a mineral imbalance in my body.
Style and stewardship
And this shows up as Excess thirst. And this also is really, really prevalent when we do things like our body is constantly excreting minerals but is constantly balancing them as well.
So take this, for example, you go and you work out. and you are sweating, or if you are crying and you have ever tasted a tear, you know, that it tastes what? It tastes salty.
Your body is getting rid of minerals naturally because it is excreting. And, and if you are in a situation where you’re sweating a lot, you might drink some water. But, if you are say a high endurance athlete or you’re someone who is, I don’t know, playing in the NBA, or you are a marathon runner, you’re rarely ever just taking in plain water.
You might have a banana if you’re running because there’s potassium in that banana that keeps you from cramping, right?
Because your body gets rid of so much sodium. And potassium actually balances this. So when you are working out, you might drink some water, but if you’re, again, if you’re like some endurance athlete or you’re going to be sweating for a prolonged amount of time, because you do CrossFit or something like that, what you typically will drink is some sort of Gatorade or Powerade.
Or, there’s another one. What’s the name of that one? It’s actually decent because the ingredients are decent. I think it’s called armor light. That’s one of the better ones. Because the ingredients aren’t as bad, I’ll buy those for my husband when he goes golfing on a really, really hot day.
So all of this to say, and then here’s the last example when you are sick and you cannot keep food down, or if you’ve ever been around a child that’s running a fever. And the first thing that they are told, the first thing that you are told by your pediatrician is not necessarily trying to control the fever. Which they’ll say, you know, you can use ibuprofen for that or whatever to break the fever.
But they are losing Electrolytes from their body. I’m gonna go ahead and call it that they’re losing electrolytes from their body, which is this combination of minerals that your cells need to stay hydrated. And they will say, make sure that your child does not become dehydrated either from using the restroom too much, you know, because they can’t keep food down or from things coming up in the other direction.
Again, if you’re eating, that’s why I gave this disclaimer. As we are doing this, we are losing minerals. And if these minerals are not. If these minerals are not placed back into our bodies, what ends up happening is we become dehydrated and this is dangerous. So when you go to the doctor, what do they give you?
They’re not giving you to, rehydrate and they give you an IV bag. It’s not plain water in that bag. They’re not like shooting you up with plain water. It is typically like a saline solution because they need to put minerals back into your body because you’ve lost them too rapidly. And that’s the case of, you know, when someone upchucks or when someone has loose, we’re not gonna get into all of that.
But, you know, it’s a natural part of life. We’ve all experienced it at some point I believe, or, you know, we’ve had a child that has experienced it. So all of this to say that the body does this job of trying to constantly maintain, not just water, but hydration.
So, hydration and drinking water are not necessarily the same thing.
style and stewardship
We can drink a lot of water, but if we are just flushing minerals out and not putting them back in through food or some sort of electrolyte, what we’re doing is we’re not allowing the water in our cells to be hydrated.
And if you would think about, a raisin, a raisin is just a grape that has been dehydrated, right.
Dehydrated, imagine that being your cell and it shrinks the opposite is also true. If too many minerals are had in that raisin gets pumped with it. Accepts too much fluid within itself, it can rupture.
So the body is extremely smart because God, who made everything made our bodies, made the universe and our bodies, and created our bodies in such a way that it is constantly maintaining this homeostasis balance.
style an stewardship
Hydration and allowing just the right amount of water to get into the cell and the right amount to also leave. But sometimes it gets bombarded by either sickness or sweating. If we are outside for a very, very long time, our body will actually. We’ll stop producing sweat after a while if you’re in a really, really hot climate and you’re constantly drinking water. Sometimes you will not even have to use the restroom because your body will hold onto that.
God made our bodies. Oh my gosh. It’s just, it’s amazing. It truly is amazing. So let’s go, let’s circle back to the experience that I was having and what I started doing, and what has made a huge change in my body.
So electrolytes actually attract water.
So it’s really, really fascinating because you know, just like the raisin example, it will, Shrivel up if too much water is taken out of this grape and it will turn into a raisin and we don’t necessarily think about this. I’ve never thought about this before drinking water just by itself. And it being filtered I never made the, honestly, I never came to the conclusion that it was bad for me to drink too much water.
And don’t get me wrong If you’re hot, drink water. In none of this am I saying, don’t drink water. Don’t go to the doctor. Don’t get checked. In none of this am I saying that! I’m gonna throw in several disclaimers here. I am saying for me personally, this was my experience. What I began to do was recognize minerals as what they are. And that is minerals help our bodies they’re essential and they help our bodies do a myriad of things.
So zinc is one of the minerals. I’m just throwing this one out there at random. If you don’t have enough zinc, if kids have a, a, vitamin deficiencies are one thing, but zinc, for example, zinc helps the immune system. And it also does a lot of things in terms of growth. And there are countries where children are deficient in zinc and they don’t grow.
They have this failure to thrive and they literally do not grow. We need phosphorus and zinc and calcium and copper and iodine and all of these different, I’m just naming a few of them. That’s not all-inclusive, but potassium, all of these things chloride, etc.
One of the things that are really interesting though, is I don’t remember being taught about mineral balance. And I don’t remember being taught of any of those things, but you can go and you can buy water that has been mineralized and it’s called mineral water.
My mom, what she would say is, you know, that there’s seven of us and she would say “before there was Gatorade or any of those things when you guys would get sick, I would make an electrolyte drink. All it would be was water, some sugar, and a couple of pinches of salt.”
And this triggered my memory. So I started doing a little bit more research. And what I began to do, which totally reversed everything that I was telling you about of using the restroom too frequently, being super thirsty. It’s like the more that I drank the thirstier that I was, and it was the craziest thing to me and I didn’t understand it.
And I just thought, well, it’s just been really, really hot outside but what I was doing was I was draining my body, excuse me, draining my body of these minerals, that it needs to keep this proper hydration. So, what I started doing was now before I have my coffee and I have this huge cup of water, I have less water.
And I now add a pinch of, so about an eighth of a teaspoon to a quarter of a teaspoon, usually about an eighth of a teaspoon of Redmond sea salt. And this is sea salt that has all of the minerals intact. This is not regular table salt, do not use regular table salt. Most of those are the type that will raise your sodium in the wrong way because there’s no balance of minerals in it.
It’s just usually sodium and there’s a bunch of other additives in it.. We’re not talking table salt, we’re talking sea salt. So this can be in the form of like a Himalaya pink, sea salt. I really like the Redmond, sea salt, and believe it or not, it doesn’t taste salty, which is the craziest thing because it’s not this concentrated sodium.
It is a whole variety of the different minerals that our bodies naturally need. So it has copper, and it has zinc and it has all of these things and some other ones as well. Some trace minerals, another way to get in electrolytes would be to buy something called trace minerals. I have not personally tried this one, but I heard that this is what a lot of people have used especially around the summer months.
I’m not sure where you are in the world, but we’re in the summer right now. And it gets super, super high. We’re talking like the nineties and heat indexes, like 1 0 2 degrees. And what’s interesting is, just this tiny little, pinch of salt in my water in the morning has made all the difference in the world. I no longer have this, this feeling of I have to go frequently.
And as I said before, all those numbers were normal anyways, but I wanted to get a full picture and rule out and really educate myself on my own body. And that is what I encourage you to do. You can drink too much water. I did not know this until my own personal experience, but you can drink too much water and you can flush very important minerals out of your body.
If you are not, you know, conscious of this. And then if you’re having a lot of diuretics, which are things like tea, things like coffee are going to naturally flush fluid from your body. It draws water out of your body. And we want to be hydrated. We think clearly, my skin even looks different by actually having hydration and not just drinking water.
I had no idea that you could. I had no idea. I really, I am a student. I’m serious. I’m a student when it comes to nutrition and life in general and the word of God, but you, you know what I’m saying? So one of the other things that I had to recognize was the fact that God…
Oh, my gosh. So when it is really, really hot, one of the things that grow in abundance, depending on where you are in the world are fruit, fruit, such as cantaloupe and watermelon and grapes and strawberries and mango and papaya, well, not papaya in this area, but you, you get what I’m saying. These things are in season during the summer.
How amazing is this? So I always say that science only proves what God has done and proves what God has given. I truly believe that. Science will never catch up to all that God has done. We will never understand at all. We’ll never understand. like, I mean, he’s God, what’s actually like truly. What blows my mind about all of this is that God gave us what we needed before we even had science to prove that we needed it.
Watermelon is 98% water. Right. But it is also packed with so many minerals, so many trace minerals that our bodies need to what? To stay hydrated in summer months. That blows my mind. So just, for example, we know that watermelon has vitamin C, we know that it has lycopene, which is, you know, that red pigment, that tomatoes also have.
It’s amazing for the heart. And watermelon actually has more than tomatoes, which I just recently found out too. It has B5, has vitamin A, but not just that. It is packed with potassium and copper. Potassium controls our blood pressure, which, it just blew my mind. Grapes have potassium and sodium and zinc and calcium and iron and phosphorous.
Cantelope has zinc and copper and folic acid and vitamin B1 all the vitamins. But here’s the thing. This is what is so crazy is that we are in the summer. We would be more hydrated to eat fruit than to just drink plain filtered water. So if you are not getting fruit in because you are afraid of sugar or if you’re not getting fruit in, because you don’t love it.
Another way to get that in would be to eat cucumbers. You can eat cucumbers, sprinkle a tiny little bit of sea salt on them, and you have electrolytes
We’re out here and we’re doing things like buying, I typically don’t buy Gatorade because I just don’t like the way, I don’t like them, but, you know, Gatorade and, and, and vitamin water and all of these different things.
God has literally provided in nature the very things that we need most before science even proved that we needed it.
style and stewardship
Or for like me, my personal experience showed me that I was lacking these minerals and, or flushing them out of my system. Replenishing them when you get sick, what do you, most people are not just drinking plain water.
As a matter of fact, when I’m sick, plain water does not taste good to me. Plain filtered water tastes horrible and I’ll literally crave things like bone broth. You know, chicken noodle soup, or I’ll want something refreshing like fruit.
And the reason why fruit is refreshing is that it literally is refreshing and revitalizing the mineral content and helps your body to balance the way that God created it to.
God is amazing. He has given us everything that we needed, even. I mean, his provision, his provision is amazing because we don’t even recognize all the things that we need that God is, and has already freely provided us with.
So all this, all this to say, hydrate, don’t just drink water, all this to say, find out what your baseline is and two, find out what is healthy for you.
Drinking a ton of water for water’s sake is not necessarily helping you.
Style and stewardship
Especially, if and when you are not just adding filtered water but, you’re adding minerals to this water as well. Wow. My mind’s blown and I’m thankful for the resources that we have. We can, we have textbooks, where we can dig a little deeper, where scientists have found out the different things that are in our food, so we know what to eat, but even before all of those things, we are naturally drawn to things that are “watery” during the summer.
We want lighter meals. Most of us, don’t want something heavy as we may want in the Fall, like chilis and soups and stews, even though I would eat soup all year round, I love soup. But all of these things are, you know, the kind of the traditional things and the traditional ways that, that we ate.
Whether it was having, broths or, you know, our mom gave us popsicles if we had a sore throat because we, we weren’t drinking a lot of water when we go out on a really hot day or if my husband’s like doing yard work or something, I’ll often bring him, and I’ve been doing this for years. I would bring him a pickle just a dill pickle and a big cup of water.
And usually, I wouldn’t put ice in it because you know, you don’t wanna raise your body temperature really drastically like that when you’re in a really, really hot condition. Anyways, I’m, I’m gonna go off on a whole other thing, but hydrate, don’t just drink plain filtered water.
A pinch of sea salt is all that I do usually two a day in the morning and kind of in the afternoon, but I’ve been eating things like pineapple. I’ve been eating watermelon. Grapes. All of these things are high in water, but also high in minerals. So I hope that this is, I mean, I don’t know about you, but my mind was blown and I’m just looking at this whole hydration thing very differently when, before I didn’t even think about it.
And now I’m very, very. I’m just, I’m, I’m thankful for it. Honestly. I hope that this encourages you and stay hydrated people. And until the next time your life matters, what you do with it matters. So what will you steward well?
