The mug.
Every morning in our house in San Antonio started the same way. My father, six foot two and around 250 pounds, military his whole life, standing at the kitchen counter with a glass mug. Not a coffee mug. One of those heavy German beer mugs with the glass handle, the kind that holds a full liter.
He’d drink two of them before the gym. Another one after the gym, before his shower. Water all day at work, alongside his coffee. Two or three more when he got home. And one more, carried up to bed.
He told me to drink water, too. Every morning. And he was right that water matters. What none of us knew was what kind he was drinking, or how fast. Play his day.
The ’90s
The cleanest water money could buy.
That water came out of a reverse-osmosis filter. In the ’90s, RO was everywhere: the big promise was that it took out every toxin in the tap. And it did take out a lot.
What nobody put on the box was what else it took. pushes water through a membrane so fine that almost nothing else gets through. Paul Pitchford’s Healing with Whole Foods puts it plainly: these units “take out just about all toxins, gases, and minerals, leaving nearly completely purified water.”
San Antonio’s water comes up from the Edwards and Trinity , and it’s very hard: loaded with calcium and magnesium from the limestone. That’s the stuff that leaves white crust on a shower head. It’s also minerals the body can use. RO took nearly all of it out, and nobody had a filter back then to put it back. Push the water through and watch what stays behind.
Too much, too fast
Two liters before the gym.
Healthy kidneys can clear about 0.8 to 1 liter of water an hour. My father put two liters in within a few minutes of waking up, and kept going all day. By bedtime it was close to two gallons.
Water that fast doesn’t soak in. It floods through. The stomach stretches, the blood gets diluted, and the body spends the rest of the morning sending it out, sodium, potassium, and magnesium along with it. Then he drank water that had none of those to give back.
Traditional Chinese medicine has said this for centuries. Pitchford writes that too much water “can cause sensations of coldness, and weaken the digestion and the energy of the whole body,” and that an excess of water depletes the digestive fire. It’s the same lesson I learned at Fort Irwin, in What Was in the CamelBak: too much, too fast, is its own kind of danger.
He wasn’t drinking water. He was rinsing himself out.
The table
Bread with every meal.
It wasn’t just the water. In the ’90s, our meals were heavy. Oatmeal in the morning. A good lunch, with vegetables. Then a big dinner, and bread with almost every meal we had. We seasoned everything. My father had a sweet tooth and never skipped dessert. He smoked cigars most of his life, three a day at his peak, and drank his coffee.
Three big meals a day, the biggest one last, while his body slowed down with age. Food sat. What sits ferments: the bloat, the heavy stomach, the distension he carried around his middle. And because it had always been that way, it felt normal. That was just life.
What I saw
The signs nobody connected.
My father was private about his health. But I lived in that house, and some things you can’t hide.
When he got sick, he was down for a long time. In his later years his skin dried out: his hands, his palms, the soles of his feet peeling, and he didn’t know why. He did cut back on the cigars, from three a day to one every other day, then one a week. By then he was living with congestive heart failure and diabetes.
I want to be honest about this. It could have been a whole lot of things. The cigars. The bread and the desserts. The heavy dinners. His heart. His age. I’m not going to tell you the water did it all.
But I believe the sheer volume of water he drank, that fast, every day, for years, left him depleted of minerals. I believe it was one of the threads, and nobody ever pulled on it. Not him, not his doctors, not me, because I was a kid and that was just how my dad drank water.
What I know now
Healthy can still be a program.
My father did everything he’d been told was healthy. He was in the gym his whole life. He trusted the VA, and he trusted his doctors. He drank more water than anyone I knew. He took his medications. He was trying.
What he couldn’t see was the pattern underneath: habits he’d picked up somewhere, maybe in uniform, maybe from a pamphlet, and never questioned again. The emotional part of it too. The belief that this is just how you live. That’s the part I work on with every guest now.
Sip, don’t flood. Keep the minerals in the water, or put them back. Chew your food. Eat the big meal at midday and let the night be for rest. None of it is complicated. It just has to be noticed.
He told me to drink water every morning. I just wish someone had told him how.
