We love to talk about the natural remedies that can help heal your ailments and even prevent some of the ailments that are here today. We believe in living by the seven principles of health, eating well, and taking care of yourself. That way you can really enjoy a healthy lifestyle, maintain a youthful state, and just have fun. We've had some really great conversations with several experts over the past weeks, so now we're going to get back to some basics. And that is, to dwell on some of the basic principles of health and really focus on some of those aspects which can really keep you healthy and happy.

Today's topic is very important: WATER. It too is one of the Seven Principles Of Health. Just reminding everybody about those, they are:

• Whole Foods
• Water
• Air
• Sunshine
• Exercise and Movement
• Regeneration/Rest
• Relationships
• Passion

Now, these things all make up principles that you'd have to live by to have a healthy and happy lifestyle. If you remove one of these aspects, everything will go out of place.

We all know that water is very important and vital to a great life. Now you might be asking how a whole article about water will seem like. Sure, it may be a bit of a boring topic. But is it? Is it really boring? Are there many other aspects which you might not have even considered? There are little things which everyone has to take into consideration. Each of these, that we're going to dwell on, will really explain what needs to happen and why it should happen in your life in order to maintain a healthy state.

Now you may have heard your doctor or health practitioner say that you need a drink of water. And it's very obvious. But why? Why is it obvious? Why do we have to drink water? These are many questions which usually go unanswered, and we think we know the answer. But do we, really? Have we really considered the aspects to deal with water to do with your own health, longevity, and youthful state? Of course we know that the answer does lie with water, so let's explore that a little bit further.

Living here as a natural organism, we rely on water. In fact, all the animals and plant life rely on water. Even the cactus in the desert has water in it. And each of us, each living organism has to have a certain amount of water to survive, and a great amount of water to thrive. Now, we don't want to just survive, we want to thrive in our lives. We want to make sure we are maintaining exactly what we should be to get a healthy lifestyle; not just surviving, but thriving.

Firstly, let's look at a plant. If a plant doesn't get a certain amount of water, it will go into survival mode. It won't regenerate, it won't thrive, and it will look sickly. It will look like it is just surviving, hanging on to dear life. It may be brown where it should be green. It might not flower properly or bring as many flowers out to bloom as is possible if it was thriving. Now, with a minimum amount of water in anyone's body, that's exactly what you're going to get; just surviving. So we need to be very clear on this. We need to have sufficient water, ample water to thrive in our lives. Just the same as with our little example of the plant. Even the cactus in the desert has a certain amount of water to survive with and a certain amount to thrive with.

Now as a human being, we have approximately 60 - 65% water, that's our make-up. So you can see how important it is. It makes our whole body function correctly, because, essentially, we are a body full of water. And it has many jobs throughout our body such as transferring, carrying, cleansing, delivering, and with hydration as well. All of these things work together very well so let's get into these aspects.

This brings us to the first question, which is: WHY? Why do we need water? Why should we rehydrate ourselves to the extent where our doctors and health practitioners are saying so? Are they just saying these things to make you look a little bit better or to sound important? No. They're actually telling you this for a very good reason. Oxygen. This is one of the things which we obviously need. But without sufficient water in our body, oxygen can't be delivered in our cells properly. So, water actually acts as a delivery system in our body. Oxygen delivery, nutrient delivery, cell regeneration, waste removal, elasticity in each cell, and it's really the difference between good-looking and healthy skin, as opposed to dry and older-looking skin. So just for the sake of natural appearance and vanity, if we could put it that way, then drinking sufficient water will help you keep that youthful state and allow your skin to regenerate and stay young-looking and be elastic. That's what we want in our skin, for it to be elastic. The same rings true for all of the cells in our body, not just the skin. Each cell relies on the water to open up, to stay elastic, to move, to regenerate itself, to shed off the old, and to bring in the new. Elasticity is the key and water makes that very possible.

As mentioned, it's the difference between healthy and unhealthy. You drink sufficient water and you will be healthy. Drink insufficient water and you will be unhealthy. And there's a reason for that. That is, your body can't remove the toxins, all the waste products that are in each cell. These will clog the system and you will get all manner of symptoms that will tell you that you have a problem. Here are some of the issues or symptoms that will show that you are not getting enough water:

You may have a headache.

Nine times out of ten is caused by not getting enough water and dehydration in your body.

You will get sore muscles.

You have too much lactic acid build-up, and it can't regenerate and open enough oxygen and allow the whole body to move. That's why you get sore muscles.

You feel tired, you feel lethargic.

It could bring on other diseases as well like kidney problems, liver problems, sore eyes, cramps, and even constipation.

The moment you start to feel thirsty, it is really your body telling you that you really need to rehydrate. By that stage, you're already dehydrating, probably too quickly. So the moment that you feel thirsty, you should already be drinking water. I'm sure there are heaps of other symptoms there as well. These are just the ones on top of my head. So, if you're experiencing one of these or if you've got a problem with one of these issues, then ask yourself if you're drinking enough water everyday.

Which brings us to the next question: HOW MUCH? How much water should you be drinking? It's really a question of how big you are. Are you a really tall or a big person? Are you a small and petite person? There are telltale signs which we can all use to tell how much water we're really drinking:

1. The first one is to ask if you're really thirsty. If you're thirsty, then your body is telling you that you need more water.
2. There's also the urine test. When you urinate, you've got to look at the color of your urine output. If it's dark brown or yellow, then you're definitely not drinking enough water. The concentration of the toxins that are inside your body and expelled out of you is way too high. In other words, you need more water to help flush out your system. You need more water to help flush out each individual cell. However, if you're urine output is clear and see-through, your urine is telling you that you've had sufficient water in your system, which is basically correct. And that's the difference between being good and healthy, and not being healthy. You will feel really bad as well. Your whole system will be telling you that you haven't got enough water.

So this brings us to our next question: WHAT TYPE OF WATER SHOULD I BE DRINKING? Everyone is pushing their product out there today. You can get nutrient water, sunlight water, colored water, and carbonated water. Of course, there's always the plain filtered water. So the real question is: What water should you be drinking? This obvious question has to be answered in a manner that we can't isolate which water is better among all the others. We really should consider what is available at the time. If you're stranded in the middle of the desert and you go to a dam or a big pond, with weeds, insects, birds, and other things growing and using that water supply, there's a fair chance that it is living water. In other words, it is not dead, not stagnant, and it won't be poisonous. Now if you're stuck in the middle of the desert, you're not going to be fussy and want to drink only filtered water. There's no way you could be thinking that, you would be looking around and seeing if it's healthy enough. I'm sure you'd be jumping in and taking a big drink. However, not all of us are stuck out in the middle of the desert. Most of us are here in some sort of urban society. If that's the case, you've got many more choices. You have pure water, filtered water, tap water, or rain water, perhaps? Or you could get bottled water from the shops. We really have to assess what we need at the time. Is filtered water great for you? Sure it's great because a lot of the impurities from the water have already been removed by the treatment plants. Now, is that better for you? Well yes, provided that you're getting supplements and nutrients from other sources as well. How about plain tap water? Is that good? Absolutely. Why? Because it is your only source. Everyone needs water, and it you can get it through tap water only, then, by all means, drink some. If you've got the opportunity to remove all the impurities from it, then that's great. One thing that we have to be sure of though is that we don't remove all the necessary nutrients out of the water. This includes magnesium and zinc, among all others.

Another part of the water that we should consider is the bacteria level in it. Now this may seem a bit crazy to some of you, but we need that bacteria as well. These help balance our inner guts. I mean, if you've never had any bacteria coming in through your mouth in small doses, you will probably have problems later on. So it's good to actually have a little bit of bacteria in your water supply, the good ones in particular. This balance will not do you harm. Rain water is a great thing as well. It has oxygen in it.

Here's another type of water which many people don't usually think about: Saltwater. It's important that you have enough salt in your diet, and you can get some through water. When you sweat or perspire, you actually lose a lot of salt. So if you think that you are losing salt through perspiration, get a glass of water and put a pinch of salt in it. This will help balance the electrolytes in your system. It's very important to understand that. Being living beings, we all need sufficient amounts of water in our systems. So it's important that we get enough salts, primarily through our food intake and our water intake.

As you can see, water is playing a real part in our health, longevity, and youthful state. There are so many things we need to consider when we're having just plain water. If you're not getting enough water, you might think you can drink just any other substitute for it. That's not quite right though.

So that begs the question: CAN YOU SUBSTITUTE WATER WITH SOMETHING ELSE AND GET JUST AS MUCH HEALTH BENEFIT OUT OF IT? Of course the answer is NO. A lot of people talk about substitutes to water. They either drink tea, or coffee, soda, softdrink, juices, or even alcohol, which makes them think they can do without water. That is really a fallacy. The fallacy there is that you can't substitute water with anything in your diet. You need to have good ol' water, straight from the tap or the bottle. Wherever it may be from, you need water, not substitutes. Tea and coffee have water in them. Although they are mostly made out of water, the added ingredients change the properties of water, which makes it a diuretic. What does it mean? It means that the water you are drinking in the form of coffee or tea starts to dry out or suck away the other water in your body. It attracts water to itself. A diuretic dries you out and dehydrates you.

What about soda and softdrinks? Well, too much sugar in your diet has the wrong effect to the whole system. Water is there to try and flush away too many chemicals and sugar in your diet. By spiking our sugar levels with the softdrink or the soda water, we're actually putting too much sugar into our system and the amount of water in our body may not be enough to flush it out. So your insulin has to work overtime and your whole body goes out of chemical balance. So because we're putting too much sugar in and not enough water to help flush it out, the chemical balance goes awry and we will have internal problems from then on. It's important that you rebalance with water. Alcohol also does the same thing as a diuretic, it dries you out. And you don't have enough water there to flush out the toxins.

Now too much sugar or too much alcohol in the system will also change the pH balance in your system. You go from a slightly alkaline state to more of an acidic state, which is not where we want to be. When we have too much acid in our system, you will also have internal problems and diseases. Water can help flush out those problems, the excess acid in particular, in order to regain the right pH in our body.

The next things as substitutes are juices. If you have a juice, sure it has lots of water, and it has a lot of other nutrients in there as well. To go on a juice fast, just juice, no water, is something you really need to consider. Perhaps get a little bit of advice as well from your health practitioner. I'm not saying it's bad for you. For around three days you could go on a juice fast, which is primarily water. However, it also depends on the type of juice that you will take. Pure fruit juices, without any other supplements, is probably not a good idea. My opinion though, is to go ask your health practitioner on healthy and natural practices. Juices are certainly great for you and they can help change your whole system, but that all depends on what you're eating at the same time. Are you going on a detox, where you're just taking juice and water? Then in that case you will be flushing out your system. You're replacing the toxins in your system with pure nutrients and the water will flush them out as well. It's very important that you do this occasionally, because we can overlay our system too much with the "too good things," like, the sugars and the sweets and the fats in our diet. So going on some sort of flush-out, or toxic removal process with water and juices is a great idea.

Lastly, we will talk about the salt levels. Why is it important to have salt levels in our water? The reason is because animals are electrical beings. That's right, we run on electricity. A great conductor or electricity is salted water. Each cell relies on the electrical impulses in our brain and in other parts of our body to pulse electricity to give signals to each of our cells and tell them what to do. So having sufficient salt levels in our system can help trigger those electrical conductivity issues properly. Without enough salt, you're not getting enough electrical conductivity through your body. To have the right chemical balance in your system, sufficient water supply, with enough salt levels in it, is very important. The cell response will be so much better with salted water in the system. I'm not talking about the ones with concentrations similar to the ocean. I am talking about a concentration of approximately a pinch of salt in every litre of water. And that will get you going to a healthy state.

Although we're not trained medical professionals, we do love to talk about and discuss the healthy measures that have been going on for countless years. We believe that they are great today, just as they were yesterday. So if you have any questions whatsoever, by all means, go check with your health professional.

Water is important. What's in it is important. Not substituting it for other alternatives is important. So look out for the issues that your body is telling you, indicating that you need more water. Stay attuned to your body; listen to it. That way, when you do need to have more water, you're ready to do so.