What Helps me Drink 96oz of Water Every Day

Okay, so tell me, was drinking water on your list of New Year's Resolutions?

We all know we're supposed to drink lots and lots of water ... 

the list of benefits is unbelievably long for plain old water.  

The Mayo Clinic says women should drink about 74 ounces (2.2 liters) a day, 

and I've struggled for years and years to do this.  

Really ... YEARS.  

For some strange reason, it's hard to drink all that water every day.  

I've tried many little tricks to entice myself to doing this good-for-me task, and failed miserably.  

I've tried:

tally marks on a calendar

tally marks on a whiteboard

checking off squares on a graph

moving eight pebbles from one pile to another

filling a pitcher with 74 ounces of water in the morning

putting out the requisite number of water bottles every day

putting eight pennies in my pocket and taking one out every time I drink a glass

planning to drink a glass on the hour every hour

You get the point.  I've tried!

Years ago someone gave me the greatest cup to encourage drinking water.  

It was a plastic cup, with a ring around the outside that had numbers 1-8 on it, 

and every time you drank a cup, you'd move the ring forward to the next marker. 

It's kind of embarrassing just how motivating I found that little cup to be.  

Tragically, the ring got broken and the cup lost its magical powers for me. 

But while it was intact I drank my water daily and for the first time in my life, 

I understood that drinking enough water

 is the difference between feeling good and feeling GREAT.  

Here's some good news:  if you're like me, when they told you to drink 8 glasses of water a day, 

you were thinking 8 big glasses.  

But actually, when they say glasses, that's an 8 ounce glass, which is only one cup.

(image source)

  

No big deal - we can do that!  

Disclaimer:  the trick I'm about to tell you is so very simple, 

you may wonder why I'm even bothering to write about it.  

More importantly, you may wonder why you're sitting there reading about it.  

Well, here's why:  it took me about 10 years to figure this one out.  

Hopefully, you're smarter than I am and figured out your own little trick before all the Y2K hubbub.  

But if there's someone out there like me who just can't find that one trick 

that helps them drink all their water, and I can save them from a decade of dehydration ... 

well, that would be cool.

Here's my technique...

It's a countdown on the refrigerator whiteboard.  

I drink 12 glasses of water a day, and every time I drink one, 

I wipe a number off the board.  

I know ... I KNOW.  But it works!    

I use a small glass, one that holds just about 8 ounces, and that seems to help too.

I try to drink 4 glasses before 9am, 4 more by noon, and if I can do that, the rest is all downhill.
I really think the trick of it is ... well ... finding a trick that gets you to do it.

For me, there's something about seeing those numbers going ...

going ...

 

gone ...

that helps me get in every last drop.

Well - most days anyway.

It's not a fancy iphone app, and there's not a www. about it ... but it does work.

How about you ... do you drink the recommended amount of water every day?
Do you have a trick to make you do it?

Does it make a difference in how you feel?