Drinking excess water is not necessary. In fact it can be dangerous to your health, drawing electrolites out of your blood by reverse osmosis in your intestines, it can adversely affect your heartbeat. It is an old wive's tale that you should drink 8, 8 oz glasses of water a day for proper hydration. People who suffer from kidney stones may want to be especially careful not to become dehydrated - but that is a far cry from over-hydration. Current medical advise is that, UNLESS, we are sweating heavily from exercise or in extremely hot or very dry conditions, we do not need to drink more than a few small glasses of water a day.
If we follow the directions to drink fluids in the quantities some diets advise, most of us would spend all our time looking for restrooms. Where do you pee when you are out on your walk? Are you going to walk out 3 times from a business meeting? What about getting up to pee at night? I think of the ads for overactive bladder. It's not the bladder, babe, if you drink too much fluids - especially at the wrong time of day - with or without caffeine! The fact is that most of us get adequate hydration from the foods and drinks we normally eat. Add a few 3-4 ozs of TAP WATER (please not bottled! there are better controls on tap water than bottled and all those environmental costs of shipping and plastic! - but that's another story.) between mealsm with your multi-vitamine pill or other meds, or before and after light to moderate exercise.
Please, don't be bamboozled by another old wives' tale that water makes you skin better - unless you normally go around so dehydrated you wrinkle up. Think about it! Excess water is excreted through the kidneys not the skin. We do not sweat more if we drink more. Imagine how we would be dripping wet even in the A/C if we sweated more water through the skin if we drank more.
The gold standard of proper hydration is to drink enough water to keep your urine pale yellow in color.
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