You have stated to stop drinking water three hours before bed, then sleep for eight hours. That means I’m going 11 hours without water. I seem to become very dehydrated going this long without fluids. Do I correctly understand your advice? How will this affect me to avoid water for so long?
Number one, you have to understand that the body needs to sleep. It is a machine that needs to sleep and rest. A lot of work was done by numbers of sleep research scientists globally including the greatest, Dr. Dement out of Stanford University who wrote a brilliant book The Promise of Sleep. He has 65 years personally invested as a top researcher on sleep. He and experts in this field think the average person needs eight and one-half hours of sleep. “Average” means some need seven and some need nine. This has been my observation as well.
Here’s another kicker. The American Cancer Society studied 250,000 people in this country and Canada. They discovered that people who sleep six hours or less and people who sleep 10 hours or more have a similar range of diseases. All of them combined have three to four times more disease than people who sleep normally.
That sounds odd and almost contradictory. Why do people who sleep 10 hours have the same amount of diseases as those who don’t sleep enough? Quite simply, the common symptomology of too much sleep is depression. Depression devastates the immune system as much as too little sleep does.
Now we have the sleep thing taken care of. You should be sleeping eight hours. I hope you are not up drinking in the middle of the night.
Many people have a problem drinking an hour before bed because their bladders are weak. Their bodies are not absorbing and being hydrated by the water they drink. They are making poor choices in the water. They have interrupted sleep. They’re up urinating throughout the night, or at least once or twice.
The best sleep is a deep sleep for eight hours. Not everyone can achieve it, but at least try to do something for eight hours rather than being up urinating.
Here is an example from my life. Before I leave the house in the morning, I consume a quart and a half of fluids. You need to start thinking about rationing. That’s a good time to do it. I’m going to be up for many hours.
Before I eat lunch, I drink approximately 16 ounces of green drinks. There’s about one-half a liter or quart of fluid again. Before I had dinner and got online with you tonight, I drank 24 ounces of green drink. I won't go to sleep for four more hours.
If I drank 16 ounces or 24 ounces one hour before I went to bed, I’d be up in the night, even as healthy as I am. You don’t want that. You can acquire the amounts of fluids through food, juices and pure water throughout the day. Time it so you’re not going to interrupt sleep.
Your hydration level is a powerful agent in health and creator of disease. If you don’t have enough, you’re in trouble. There is one point I make with guests when they arrive at Hippocrates.
Over the years, I have seen people die from their disease. To die from a disease, you literally need to have a vital organ stop functioning. That seldom happens.
When people become very ill, historically there are two things they stop doing. They stop sleeping well, and they stop drinking. If we weren’t under the constraints of a legal system, a doctor would probably put on every death certificate, “What this person really died from is dehydration and sleep deprivation.”
The longest anyone has ever been documented staying up without dying was 11 days. The average person is eight or nine days. I’m not saying they stay up constantly, but they have constant interrupted sleep and they become very ill. Think about all of that.