I Tried Drinking 8 Glasses of Water for 8 Days and No, It Did Not Change My Life.

Habits — good habits — don’t produce spontaneous miracles.

I have this habit of putting things off until I couldn’t possibly avoid them for another second.

In college I tried reading all seven Harry Potter books in the two weeks leading up to the first part of the Deathly Hallows movie and probably almost died trying.

Just recently I watched Black Panther for the first time — more than a week after it lost to Green Book for Best Picture at the Oscars.

And then there have been the things that actually mattered in terms of real-world importance, like contacting my references AFTER I’d already been through several interviews for the same job, and that one time I realized too late that my ID was not in fact in my wallet and, well, let’s just say it was the one day I really should have had it with me.

So you probably won’t be surprised to know that even though I set many goals at the start of 2019, most of them sat untouched on my goal board for longer than I’m willing to admit.

Most people jump right on their New Year’s resolutions on January 1st and have probably already given up a month into the year. I’m mostly the opposite. If I don’t plan accordingly, it sometimes takes a month or two for the foundations of a new habit to kick in.

But do you know what? These late-blooming habits strangely have a way of sticking in a way January 1st habits often don’t. Like in late February when I finally decided it was time to start listening to my body and give it the adequate hydration it deserved.

I’d fallen out of the habit of tracking my fluid intake with my Fitbit app. Though I wasn’t feeling particularly awful, I function better when I consistently have small goals to work toward. And drinking more water seemed like it would be an easy goal to start with.

It wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought it would be, it turns out. Sometimes I start hyper-focusing on things and forget to keep drinking, and then it’s a mad rush at the end of the day to make sure I catch up. But that’s a personal problem. I’m working on it.

My goal: To drink 8 cups or “glasses” of water every day for 8 days straight.

Why 8 glasses of water? Because that’s how much most people think they need to drink every day. In reality, your fluid needs depend completely on factors specific to you — your activity level, your weight, and more. But 8 cups of water daily, or 64 total ounces, was both doable and harmless. I kind of hoped it might benefit me, even in very small ways.

So I did what I always do when I commit fully to a goal: I wrote it down, thought about what I would need to change in order to make it happen (cleaning my reusable water bottle was super easy), and set a starting deadline … for the next morning.

Why wait? If you can, I say decide to do something and then immediately get up and do it.

I won’t bore you with a day-by-day detailed summary of what happened. I pretty much just went about my business as usual, except I thought more about water in a little over a week than I have in almost a year. I forgot how much I hate not-ice-cold water.

Honestly, I was slightly disappointed by Day 8. But only slightly.

Other than suddenly having to pee ALL THE TIME (seriously), I barely noticed any difference. After 8 days, I didn’t feel more energized, happier, fuller, or more motivated to do all the things. I just felt like me, but with a lot more water hanging out in my trillions of absorbent cells.

At the end of the eighth day, after peeing for the 4000th time (seriously), I decided two things: one, that I was going to continue the habit I had committed to establishing, and two, fruit-infused water is actually holy water in disguise.

Did I expect more results in a shorter amount of time — like that my skin would start glowing or I’d get fewer headaches? Maybe. But the point of my experiment wasn’t to see instant changes. It was to see how doable it would be, conquer any barriers I might come up against, and create a simple path for myself to follow going forward. And maybe to find out if some of the weird things my body was doing were at all hydration-related.

Habits — especially health-related ones — are not meant to be “tried” for a certain amount of time and then forgotten. I didn’t one day decide to try drinking more water for a week and then quit. I began developing a habit, one I have thus far maintained past the end of my own personal “challenge.”

A habit is meant to be developed slowly over long periods of time. Even slower are the results and differences you may or may not experience from making gradual changes in your life.

The reason so many people fail to keep their habits — or to form new ones at all — is because their instant gratification-dependent minds deflate when a week goes by and they feel exactly the same as they did before.

Perhaps in three, four, maybe even five weeks if I am still monitoring my water intake and manage to keep up with my daily goal, I will start to notice differences in the way I feel. I don’t know how much water I was drinking before I started this, but it sure wasn’t 64+ ounces. Was I dehydrated? Probably not — most people aren’t as dehydrated as they think they are.

But it’s possible I wasn’t getting enough water, based on factors like exercise. It could take weeks for results, if any, to become apparent. Or I won’t even notice and I’ll happily continue on with my life, water bottle by my side.

The purpose of taking care of yourself health-wise isn’t always to improve how you feel. That’s a hard truth for a lot of people to accept. Toxic diet culture and pseudo-health gurus promise them that changing one thing will instantly make them feel brand-new. In most cases, it won’t.

The same goes for results-focused health goals like losing weight, eating more vegetables, or working out more. If you expect to notice differences instantly — especially if you expect any “instant” results to last — you’re in for a very rude awakening.

This is why the whole SMART goals concept applies to more than just work and productivity. If you don’t break your health goals into small pieces and work toward them one by one until you either get the results you want or adjust your goal. you’re never going to experience positive change.

You also need to develop the patience necessary to give your mind and body time to adjust to new things. Good things in life do not come easily, and the only way to get better at waiting for your hard work to pay off is to keep working toward something you want to earn. Always.

It might take weeks. Months. Even years. But won’t the work — and the outcome — be worth the wait?

In the long-term, maybe drinking more water or eating more veggies or working out three times a week instead of zero really will change the way you feel. Maybe you really didn’t realize how far off you’d drifted and you’ll be able to celebrate taking better care of yourself.

Just don’t expect change to happen drastically and instantly, especially when your body is the thing you want to see transform.

There is no such thing as a miracle cure or an instant turnaround in medicine, nutrition, or fitness. It’s those who willingly make long-term commitments to their health that not only notice results, but also maintain them. Losing five pounds of water weight means nothing if you go right back to eating entire bags of potato chips and “gain” it all back. Drinking more water doesn’t matter if you try it for a week and then give up.

If we really want to change our collective health for the better, we won’t do it by promising or expecting magic tricks. Realistic goals produce realistic results. Do the work, take things one day at a time, and never lose sight of what you’re really trying to accomplish.

Want to set a goal to drink 8 glasses of water a day — or whatever health milestone you want to hit within a certain amount of time? Start with an 8-day timeline. Then do it for 8 more days, 8 more days after that, and so on. Don’t overwhelm yourself with too much too soon, and don’t force yourself to think too far ahead to the future.

Take things slow. Be patient. And always remember to breathe. Change will come, if you give it time and refuse to quit before it has the chance to reveal itself to you.