Hydration HYPE: How Did We All Get So Thirsty?
I’m 84 years old, and I have a confession to make: I never drank water growing up. None of us did. There were no water bottles, no hydration schedules, and certainly no wellness influencers with 64-ounce jugs and urine charts.
We drank when we were thirsty. That was the entire hydration strategy. Yet somehow, we survived. We aged. We worked. We gave birth. We went to school without a hydro flask strapped to our backpacks. And we did it all without being told our bodies were shriveling from the inside out due to “chronic dehydration.”
Today, hydration has become a full-blown moral imperative—particularly for women. The current wellness narrative insists we must all consume 90 to 100 ounces of water daily, or risk foggy brains, bad skin, and moral failure. Should we save the wellness obsessed woman who doesn't lug around a $45 pastel thermos at all times? She is definitely NOT helping the environment.
But here's the truth no one seems to mention: everything contains water. Fruits, vegetables, soup, tea, even meat. A steak is more than 60% water. But you won’t hear that from the wellness industry, because it doesn’t fit their aesthetic of purified, filtered, lemon-zested liquid virtue.
Worse still, this fetish for constant hydration exists alongside another undeniable reality: we are running out of clean water. Climate scientists are sounding the alarm, municipalities are rationing, and yet the trend is to consume and waste more water than ever in the name of "health."
Let’s be honest: most healthy people eating a reasonable diet and moving through their day do not need to obsess over fluid intake. Yes, drink water if you’re thirsty. But don’t let a TikTok trend convince you that your life depends on constant sipping. Your body knows how to regulate thirst. It's not a glitch—it’s a built-in system that’s worked for millions of years.
The obsession with hydration isn’t really about health—it’s about control, image, and consumerism. And it’s exhausting. Women especially are sold the idea that we must be in constant maintenance—flushed, detoxed, alkalized, and topped off with electrolytes at all times.
Enough Already!
Drink when you're thirsty. Eat food that tastes good in your own mouth—but make sure it's not a snack. Yes—snacking upsets your hormones and is rather tacky too. Toddlers snack because their stomachs are too small to handle a full meal of 26 bites. Today’s stomachs are huge. Eating 60 bites at one time is how we stretched our stomachs. No wellness guru ever says, “It’s so good, but I can’t eat another bite!”
We’ve forgotten how to orchestrate a MEAL—with the right beverage (which is not H₂O), and a dessert to signal: We are DONE. We have closed our mouths for 4–5 hours until we sit down to enjoy another MEAL. That’s the real point. That’s what you learn at 80bites.com. And that’s how you start rebalancing your messed-up hormones.
Wellness is just branding. A distraction from the facts:
65% of us have waistlines over 35 inches. That means we are obese. That’s 170 million American adults out of 260 million bodies.
Wellness influencers aren’t promoting well-being—they’re promoting panic. Scaring women into buying more, doing more, measuring more. And it fails. Every time.
No one gets slimmer by drinking 100 ounces of water a day—unless they also reduce quantity. Not calories (though usually, if you eat 26 bites in the context of a real meal—where flavors and nutrients blend and sugar is buffered—you’ll consume fewer calories too).
Fewer, not less. They’re countable. You just can’t see those pesky calories but you’ve been counting them for decades.
So now you feel bad for not guzzling water all day—even though it’s inconvenient, expensive, and wasteful.
Now you punish yourself for not hitting the perfect number of grams of protein—even though we don’t use the metric system.
Let’s stop pretending. The wellness industry isn’t making us healthier—it’s just making us anxious and terminally confused.