This week, keep using your glucose meter every day and focus on drinking more water. If you are still drinking sodas, regular or diet, or just have to have your morning orange juice (and I don’t care if it’s fresh-squeezed!), this is a good time to stop. Yeah, cold turkey. Make sure you have plenty of water on hand! You can drink bottled water, tap water, or filtered water, but not distilled water because you need the minerals. (See the detailed list below for what is Not Allowed.)

Primary Goal: To discover the optimum amount of water that YOU should drink, make increases as needed, and then maintain that amount throughout each day.

Secondary Goal: To decrease/eliminate consumption of sweetened beverages (regular or diet) and fruit/vegetable juices, and replace with water.

How much water should I drink? You may have grown up believing that you should drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water. What do you think now? Is that too much? Is it enough? Or does it depend on something else–on your height and weight, your age, your gender, your level of activity?

Someone recently came up with the idea that you should take the number of your weight (in pounds) and divide in half, and that is the number of ounces of water you should drink. For example, if you are 150 lbs., you should drink 75 oz. of water. That’s more than eight 8-oz. glasses! But in NO case should you drink more than 128 oz. (1 gallon or 3.785411784 liters) because you could die. Here’s such an account, though rare, that can happen. “The hiker who died from drinking TOO MUCH water: Excess fluid and lack of food caused her brain to fatally swell.”

Nutritional Therapy Practitioner Christine Moore, in her book Real Keto Food, says that not only can you not count caffeinated drinks in your water requirement, but since caffeine is a diruretic, you have to ADD the number of ounces to your total in order to replace the water lost from a diuretic drink! So, in the above example, if you have a 12-oz. coffee (even if it’s black with no cream or sugar) or cola drink, you would have to add 12 oz. to the 75 oz., making a total of 87 oz. Got it?

Finally, brain-function specialist Dr. Arlene Taylor says to “just drink enough so you pee one or two pale urines per day. Personally, I find that a much easier way to track my level of hydration.”

Now it’s up to you! Record the number of ounces (or milliliters) that you drink each day. At the end of the week, compare your water consumption with your daily fasting blood glucose to determine if it has had any effect on your fasting blood glucose.

Not Allowed:

• Agave nectar
• Chocolate milk
• Coffee drinks
• Commercial coffee creamer
• Condensed milk
• Fruit drinks
• Fruit juices
• High fructose corn syrup
• Maltitol
• Sweet tea
• Sweetened sodas (regular or diet)
• V-8 drinks of any variety

For more references about water and diabetic health, see https://adventistvegetariandiabetics.wordpress.com/about/8-laws-of-health/water/water-and-diabetic-health/.