If you’ve followed me for even a short time, you know I get-high on building healthy habits. Why? Because I’ve changed my whole life by building one healthy habit at a time — With definite nutrition recommendations, plus mindset and emotional mastery strategies, I help my clients do exactly the same.
I’ve learned on my own, and with my clients, that if we can create success with one small habit, we’re more adept later to take on the bigger habits needed to achieve the loftier goals we REALLY want to achieve most in life.
In this spirit, I offer you 1 super-simple habit to start your day, but one that’s laden with far-reaching health benefits!
Begin every morning with a cup of hot, steamy, boiling water. Hot water dilates your cells, tissues and organs, which promotes circulation, digestion, hydration and elasticity, and washes away impurities.
Ayurvedic medicine, one of the world’s oldest holistic healing systems says sipping on hot water can cure us of 100s of diseases.
Let’s break this down:
Even if you get just temporary improved circulation while drinking hot water, you’re promoting oxygen-rich blood flow throughout your body, and oxygen is literally life-force energy. This point alone is a compelling stand-alone reason.
But that most eat a diet high in processed food these days, foods that are categorically devoid of the most life-giving substances on the planet, water and oxygen, dehydration is common place. This absence of water in foods and the mainstream diet causes dehydration throughout the body, which devolves down to the single most common digestive problem today, constipation. Chronic constipation is the single condition with the most detrimental side-effects on the human body and quality of life.
And that the human body is on average 50-75% water, it makes sense that basic levels of hydration are not only necessary for maintaining healthy digestion and radiant, supple skin, beginning on the cellular level, but it’s also necessary to ensure that every organ and system can run your “machine,” your body, as optimally as it was designed to run. Human cells simply can’t function without water.
When water is hot, it can promote sweating and the release of toxins out of your cells, tissues and organs. Toxicity can cause excess weight, fatigue, brain fog and every other health symptom you experience.
Experiment with drinking hot water every morning for 21 days. It’s a simple, but worthy habit to try, to see what sorts of benefits show up for you.
Now for a few complimentary recommendations:
- Sip water (keep it hot if you know you’re dehydrated) throughout the day for maximum hydration. As an analogy, imagine a dry sponge. Can it pick up water off your counter as readily as a damp sponge? No. Your cells are the same — they can’t absorb as readily when they’re dehydrated, so sipping water throughout the day will ensure maximum hydration, and all the benefits it provides.
- The standard recommendation is to take in 1/2 your body weight in ounces of water. If you weigh 150 pounds, you’ll drink 75 ounces of water, with one caveat: Green juice is the ideal stand-in. I begin my day with hot water, and I sip water throughout the day, especially days when fasting. But I always drink green juice to break my fast, as the first nutrition of the day.
- First thing in the morning, omit any additives, like lemon, and especially like caffeine, which is dehydrating. By sipping plain, hot steamy water first thing in the morning, you’re hydrating, while not asking your body to turn on any systems, like digestion. The benefit? You maintain the state of healing, rebuilding and even promote weight loss during this added window of time.
Try it and see how many seemingly benign problems seem to go away.
Questions? Post them below. I’d love to help.
Love this tip, and the idea that the water should be plain. The whole lemon thing makes it complicated and never felt right to me. I love, too, the idea that we should build one habit at a time. This helps me, someone with many areas that could use change. Thanks!
Ya, lemon is so great, so alkalizing, but with the intermittent fasting that I also recommend you experiment with a little Jan, plain hot water is the way to got
I do this every morning, but I add lemon. So you are saying not to add that or ACV. What does the lemon do? Turns on our systems?
Because I know you’ve done some intermittent fasting Courtney, yes, this is better because you’re still in a straight fast, with no nutrition when you don’t add anything to the hot water.