Drinking Water
The Bay Area seems to have changed into fall mode in the last week, with 90 degree days in Hercules replaced with a cool 65. Something in this switch has triggered allergies I didn’t know I had, and I am really tired.
Not quite as tired as Morgan (hand pictured) and Ollie were when I took this photo of them still asleep one morning.
Speaking of being tired, my company had something called “lug a mug month” last month (the connection between this and being tired will come in a few paragraphs).
“Lug a mug” was a program where the company gave us stainless steel mugs so that we would cut down our use of paper cups when we got coffee. I don’t drink coffee, and generally don’t like drinking out of metal things, so I gave mine to Morgan last year. This year they didn’t give out any mugs (cost savings), but encouraged us not to use the little paper cups. Normally I would simply proceed to “not care” about something like this, but there was one co-worker on my floor who was really gung-ho about the whole effort and gave people crap for using the paper cups.
"Yeah...so if you could go ahead and not use those, that'd be great"
I began to feel persecuted for my many paper cups of water (which I was trying to drink more of), and decided I would get myself a nice re-usable bottle to avoid office scorn and encourage me to drink more water.
So I went to the company website and bought a nice, BPA free, branded water bottle for $14 which I was relatively pleased with.
OK, not really worth $14, but whatever.
Later I found out another one of my coworkers had 15 company water bottles sitting in his office from a recruiting event he went to, oops.
Anyway, I was determined to get my $14 worth (because I refuse to let go of sunk costs), and began carrying the bottle around with me everyday and keeping it filled. A few things came of this. First, I found myself drinking four or five fills of this 24 ounce container of water each day (5 fills is one cup shy of a gallon for reference), and I stopped drinking anything else. I effectively killed my four to five diet cokes a day habit without even trying, and have barely had any caffeine for about four weeks now.
Yes, I also had to pee a lot. No, that isn't me.
The weird thing about this is, on average, I feel much less tired now (there’s the connection!). I don’t have 5 hour a day spasms of energy (I also haven’t drank any of the 5 hour energy drinks in my desk), but I feel normal pretty much all day from the second I wake up. I also feel like I eat a lot less on days where I drink a ton of water, so I’m inclined to keep this up and see how it goes.
Of course, I haven’t actually lost any weight yet since I started keeping track a week ago (see the Couch to 5K page), so no definitive results on whether this is actually helping me in any other way outside of inadvertently putting a stop to my caffeine consumption, but I’ll let you know how that goes.
Well, that’s it, no funny story today, but if you see me carrying around a bottle of water with me all the time, now you know why. Tune back tomorrow, when I’ll have my Couch to 5K page updated for Day 7 of the program (with a weigh-in, oh boy!), and I’ll discuss my upcoming trip to SoCal for the weekend. Adios corndoggers.
