Drinking

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Don't worry, I'm not over here boozing it up at 27 weeks pregnant. But I am struggling with the crazy amount of water they say you're supposed to drink during pregnancy.

They say to aim for around 8 eight-ounce glasses of water a day, or around 64 ounces. On some sites I've read as high as 80-96 ounces. You can also consider juice, tea, coffee and milk as going toward your intake, although one could safely assume that the majority of your fluid intake should be water.

While drinking a lot of water is overall really good for you and the baby, drinking plenty of water also helps you retain less water. Which, of course, could help save you from cankles! And if that's not the extra motivation you need to chug some H2O, I'm not sure what is.

I haven't actually taken the time to see how much I'm drinking over the course of an average day...I just hear 8 glass of water and cringe on the inside. Seems like a lot, no?

So, let me break it down...

I always start my day with about 8 ounces of orange juice at breakfast.

Here's my fluid line up for today at work:


I always have my pink Camelbak water bottle with me, which I finish by the end of the day. It's around 25 ounces. In addition, I always have another glass or bottle of water, equaling around 17 ounces. So just sitting at my desk, I manage 42 ounces! Not bad.

In the evenings after work, I only drink water. I have a large glass that I refill as much as I can. On average, I will fill it up twice, and the glass holds around 16 ounces.

Today is a rather, err, special day because it's a balmy 18-degrees outside. Which of course necessitated a Starbucks run on my way to work. I limit my caffeine intake to a few times a week, but with the colder weather it's difficult to stay away. So today I grabbed a tall skinny latte, which is 12 ounces. And then I saw the orange juice and just had. to. have. it. That's another 15 ounces.

So, on an average day (i.e. one where I go straight to work and avoid Starbucks at all costs) I consume about 82 ounces of fluids, of which 74 ounces is water. Not too shabby!

On a weird day like today, should I manage to consume everything sitting at my desk plus my usual evening water intake, I will have had about 109 ounces of fluid, of which 74 ounces is water.

Now that I've broken it down, getting all of the fluids the baby and I need (especially all of the water) is far less intimidating...and I'm actually not completely failing at it.

Cankles, stay far, far away from me!

(I promise to take pictures of my ankles right around my due date and we'll see whether or not I've managed to ward off the hated cankles.)

1 comment:

Yin said...

I drank about a gallon of water a day when I was pregnant. It was a drastic change from my normal days of always being dehydrated, and I thank my LO for making me thirsty all the time. I never had cankles or even the tiniest bit of swelling while pregnant, and I think drinking so much water helped.

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