The Importance of Water in Your Diet Plan

One of the most important things you can do for better nutrition and a successful diet is to drink enough water. Learn about water's vital role in your diet and in helping you lose weight.

By Chris Iliades, MD

Medically reviewed by Pat F. Bass III, MD, MPH

Want a great diet tip? Drink more water.

Drinking plenty of cold, clear water is essential for your health and, in fact, for your very survival. You can live much longer without food than you can without water. Water is an important part of all body functions and processes, including digestion and elimination. When you’re on a diet, water also acts as a weight-loss aid because it can help you eat less.

"Drinking water is important during weight loss because it provides hydration without unwanted calories. Drinking non-caloric fluids like water before or with a meal can help a dieter feel full sooner," explains Donna Logan, RD, a registered dietitian at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. “So in addition to not adding calories, drinking water may help replace or avoid unnecessary food calories found in snacks or extra servings at mealtime. Drinking water also helps flush wastes from the body, which is especially important during times of fat metabolism and weight loss."

Water: Drinking Enough to Boost Your Diet

Recommendations from the Food and Nutrition Board are for women to get 91 ounces per day and men 125 ounces from all sources — water, other beverages, and foods with a high water content.

When it comes to water alone, explains Logan, "A general recommendation is to drink eight 8-ounce cups of water per day, for a total of 64 ounces. This is a generalization only, and actual fluid needs are affected by diet, physical activity, body composition, and climate."

For instance, this number goes up if you exercise — a key to successful weight loss — and even more so in hot weather when it’s possible to lose about the equivalent of a quart of water in an hour, according to the American Council on Exercise. You’ll want to drink water before, during, and after every workout.

Don’t wait to feel thirsty to start sipping — that’s a sign that dehydration has already started to occur. You want to drink water throughout the day, on a regular basis.

The Right2Water campaign.

Access to good quality water was the topic of the first-ever official hearing held for a European citizens' initiative at the European Parliament on 17 February. The Right2Water campaign wants universal access to clean water and sanitation and opposes the liberalization of water services. They collected nearly two million signatures in order to ask the European Commission to produce EU legislation on this. We talked to the organizers to find out more.

Organizers of the Right2Water campaign are urging the Commission to guarantee access to water and sanitation for all Europeans and give legally binding guarantees that water services will not be liberalized in the EU.

 "Water is not a commodity, it is part of our heritage," said Anne-Marie Perret, president of the Right2Water citizens' committee. "We think the initiative is a step in the right direction, but we need to go further and convince the whole Commission to stop applying internal market and competition rules, which are technocratic, and move towards rules based more on the principles of social justice and democracy."

Citizens' initiatives give people the chance to ask for new European legislation, provided organizers collect at least one million signatures  from all over the EU in support of the plans. Ms Perret said it was important to educate people more on the possibilities the initiatives give them, although she acknowledged that one of the problems was getting enough signatures. “Some of the citizens refused to sign because they had to give their ID number," she said. "There were also big problems with the online signing."