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  4. Chris recently re-posted one of his old blog articles on water, and I was wondering whether it might be harmful for my client to drink three liters of water a day on a Paleo diet. She doesn’t sweat much or engage in heavy exercise, but as a mom of two and therefore on her feet a lot, she feels she has to drink because she’s of the fixed opinion that it’s necessary for her to stay in good health.

Chris recently re-posted one of his old blog articles on water, and I was wondering whether it might be harmful for my client to drink three liters of water a day on a Paleo diet. She doesn’t sweat much or engage in heavy exercise, but as a mom of two and therefore on her feet a lot, she feels she has to drink because she’s of the fixed opinion that it’s necessary for her to stay in good health.

Kelsey Marksteiner: Good question. I don’t think it’s harmful, necessarily, for her to be drinking three liters a day, but if she’s doing it simply because she thinks it’s healthy, then you can give her a little bit of education—so you could send her that article as a starting point—you could talk to her about it, and I would almost phrase it as an exercise or an experimentation with her to just take away that idea that three liters is important for health, and just say, “I want you to spend two or three days just drinking when you feel like you need to drink,” and then measuring that to see what it ends up being and kind of taking stock of how she feels at that level of hydration. If it doesn’t seem to make a difference to her, if she doesn’t notice anything and she’s drinking, like, two liters instead, I think that’s probably fine. She doesn’t need the three liters, but I don’t necessarily think the three liters is harmful either. She could need that. Maybe just that she’s on her feet a lot, she needs some extra water. As long as she’s getting her micronutrients and her minerals, she’s salting her food appropriately to taste, she’s getting magnesium, she’s getting potassium from the diet, all that sort of stuff, I think it’s probably fine. But if you think it’s a problem, which it sounds like you might, in that case, I would potentially, like I said, just have her go through an exercise where she drinks when she feels like she needs to instead of kind of forcing herself to drink for a couple of days just to see what the difference is. If she doesn’t notice all that much of a difference in terms of how she feels or anything like that, then she may be open to just drinking a little bit less water, but like I said, I don’t think it’s too harmful as long as she’s getting all the minerals and things that she needs to otherwise, so I wouldn’t worry too, too much about it.

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