Your drinking water plays a major role in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Proper hydration keeps your body’s joints and tissues protected and can even help with your weight-loss goals! But if you’re drinking the wrong kind of water, your hydration habit may be doing more harm than good. When it comes to health and hydration, there are a few tricks for getting the best use from your water.

Water and Weight Loss

Loads of publications are encouraging the hydration hype. One recent study in the journal Obesity got people really excited about drinking water’s role in weight loss. The 12-week study observed that adults who drink water before meals tended to lose more weight. In fact, the people in the study who drank 16 ounces of water before each meal lost about 9 pounds on average over the 3-month study. That group of people didn’t even exercise more than their counterparts (the group that just ate their meals as normal). The only difference was the water, and it appears that drinking water before meals worked wonders in making them feel fuller. The water-drinkers ended up eating less calories because they were happily hydrated!

This study helps prove that staying hydrated can help keep you from overeating, so if you’re craving a something to nibble on, try sipping a glass of water first. Your body might be confusing thirst for hunger. Consistent hydration is the best way to stave off snack-attacks, so try to sip water all throughout the day. Otherwise, give yourself 30 minutes to hydrate before meals and you might feel satisfied enough to bypass extra bites!

Of course, for drinking more water to become a true habit—and something that you actually enjoy doing—it has to taste good! The real trick for staying hydrated is to check your drinking water quality. Is it tasty, clean, and refreshing? Or…smelly and unsafe? It’ll be a lot harder to keep a hydration habit if your home’s drinking water is plain tap water—or if you’re using a basic water filter that isn’t even working to remove impurities. Hydrating the wrong way means you’re drinking water that’s riddled with toxins. It’s definitely time to rethink your regimen.

About Water Filtration

In order to truly adopt drinking water into your new daily routine, you’ve got to feel good about what you’re putting in to your body. That means it needs to taste great and actually be healthy for you. That’s where home water filters come in. Want to remove contaminants from your water and drink water that’s truly clean? Invest in reverse osmosis (or RO for short). These systems are great for filtering all the nasties out of your water, so you’re left with water that’s truly delicious in every sense of the word.

The quality of tap water varies drastically from home to home, and even within your own home throughout the year. Even though tap water is “cleaned” at your local treatment plant, it can still contain dissolved metals like iron and lead, mercury, and arsenic. Another major problem in tap water is chlorine. It’s used as a disinfectant during the treatment process, and levels still remain in your drinking water even as it flows from your home faucet. It’s got an especially odd odor and taste—not exactly a tasty addition your coffee, tea, and drinking water.

Fortunately, home RO systems can help you get rid of these water problems. RO units effectively remove all natural and synthetic toxins from your water. No more microbes and debris—just pure drinking water! You’ll immediately notice a change in how your water tastes in all aspects of your kitchen. The flavors of your favorite coffee and tea improve with RO water, your ice cubes are cleaner, and your homemade soup and pasta water work better too! Most importantly, you’ll know that you and your family are hydrating with the cleanest—and healthiest—water possible.