Beauty and Health Benefits of Drinking Water

We all want smooth, soft, unblemished skin. But sometimes it seems like great skin is either something you’re born with or something you’ll never achieve. These days, the medical industry has created skin care treatments that are halfway between plastic surgery and serious cosmetics. You can have your skin sanded, chemically peeled, zapped with lasers, frozen or injected with Botox, the catchy hyphenated name for botulism toxin. You can spend thousands of dollars in a pretty short period of time to achieve results that may or may not be what you hoped for.

But one of the most wonderful skin care treatments is easily available to everyone, has side benefits that affects not just your rosy glow but your whole body, and is utterly painless to use. It’s called water, and you drink it.

Not coffee. I know, coffee has water. It also has an abundance of interesting chemicals including caffeine, which raises your heartbeat, exaggerates stress on the body and causes diuresis, or loss of hydration. All these things combine to make for ravaged, hag-like skin, which if that’s what you’re aiming for, is just fine. But those of us who want to hold off hagdom as long as possible have to face the facts: that cappuccino may taste good, but it’s going to increase under eye circles, make your kidneys work harder than they should, and can result in breakouts, flushing and blotchy skin.

The facts are these. Not Pepsi, not beer, not juice, not even tea can replace the magical, rejuvenating effects of that old classic, H2O

How much water should you drink

With these thoughts in mind, I decided to actually drink the 8, 8-ounce glasses of water recommended by beauty experts and dermatologists alike. That’s four glasses in the morning, and four more after lunch, a doable goal. I filled my glass from the tap and took a drink. I tasted chlorine, chemicals, weird odiferous things that don’t smell like water should. City water stinks. This was going to be harder than I thought. 

Bottled Drinking Water

I could buy bottled water, at a dollar a pint, at the grocery store. Let’s see, there are two cups in a pint, and I need to drink at least 8 cups per day. Four dollars a days sounds like a lot for water, don’t you think? Like I’m going to spend $120 a month on drinking water! And, then I’ll need to buy 28 bottles of water a week, and bring them home and store them. At this rate, I’ll never drink water again. 

Tap Water Filters for Safe Drinking Water at Home

But I went to my girlfriend’s house for dinner, and when she poured water into her fridge pitcher, I noticed a space-age contraption hanging off the tap. She said it’s called a water filter and you drink water with it. When I sipped my glass of water, I understood. No weird chemical smells, no salty-chlorinated creepiness, just clean, tasty water. This stuff I can drink!

She filled a gallon bottle for me, and I brought home a supply. The next day, I went online and checked out drinking water filters, finally choosing the Brita facet water filtration system for its quality and price. I read upon it a little first, and found that the Brita filter removes lead, asbestos, toluene and benzene, among a couple of dozen other impurities and really frightening chemicals.

And somehow, although your water is filtered of all sorts of horrible, cancer-causing agents, the Brita lets the fluoride remain, keeping your teeth strong.

I’m drinking my eight glasses a day now, and am already seeing the positive effects. I never realized how I avoided drinking water because it always tasted so bad, but now I like it—it tastes great!