This simple trick will tell you if you’re dehydrated instantly
If you’ve ridden the tube to work this morning, you won’t have been able to avoid the signs encouraging you to carry a bottle of water “in this hot weather” and TFL has a point.
The NHS recommend drinking six to eight glasses of water a day but how many of you actively make sure that you hit this target? How hydrated do you reckon you actually are? Probably not as much as you’d like following a bank holiday of sunbathing and cider, right?
In a bid to encourage people to keep an eye on their hydration levels, a simple trick to measure dehydration has surfaced.
Backed by the National Library of Medicine, it’s all about measuring your skin’s turgor which is the skin’s elasticity.
On the back of the hand, the back of the arm or the abdomen, using your thumb and index finger, grasp a section of skin until it is tented up. Hold the skin for a few seconds and then release. If the skin rapidly snaps back to its normal position, you are hydrated, if not you need to drink water.
According to the NHS, other symptoms of dehydration to watch out for are feeling thirsty, having dark yellow and strong smelling pee, feeling dizzy or lightheaded, feeling tired, having dry mouth, lips and eyes and peeing little and less than four times a day.
It is worth nothing that you shouldn’t now go and chug all the H2O you can find, because you can actually drink too much, but do stick to the recommended six to eight glasses a day and you should be absolutely dandy.
