09.14.06
Fluid Consumption
Oh glorious water. Wet, cool, and so ultimately refreshing. Full of ice or warm as a spring afternoon, I don’t care. All I know is I love water. An obsession that has really only begun since working in kitchens.
I have never been a big drinker of water really. Sure, I read the reports that said you were supposed to drink eight glasses of water every day. But apart from that being a chore and a hassle and a cause for me to pee all the time, I never could really get behind it. I always considered myself to be generally dehydrated, but it was never all that big a deal.
 I never would have guessed that this would look like a great meal… |
But now eight glasses of water is what I refer to as “breakfast”. At 8 AM every morning I am already in front of six burners, all going at full blast as I am cooking up a storm for the day ahead of us. The sweat begins its migration down my back around 8:30 and by 9 or so, I am on my second glass of several for the day.
I lose fluids in the kitchen at an astonishing rate. If I drank the way I do now back when I was working a desk job, I would be in the bathroom every seven and a half minutes. It would be the sort of stuff that would earn me the moniker of “leaky” or “Sir Pees-a-lot”. But as it stands, I can work a 12 hour double shift, drinking water the whole time, and never once have to use the bathroom. The fluid loss is really that serious.
Most people I know cannot function without their morning cup of coffee. They cannot talk coherently, and refuse to do any business until they have had that first cup of dirty water. I don’t drink caffeine myself, so I never really understood this until someone in the restaurant was trying to tell me something, and I had to interrupt them as it was 10 AM and I had not started rehydrating yet. Without my morning water, I was pretty useless, and had to pound three large cups of water before I could really pay attention to my friend.
But it is not just water that I am consuming in greater quantities these days. See, the flip side of this coin is the trap that most chefs fall into. Work ends late at night, your friends are all asleep and the only businesses that are open are bars. This is how many chefs are lured into alcoholism, or at least heavily increased consumption of it. The other thing I have discovered is: alcohol is a really great pain killer. OK, so maybe I am not the first person in history to discover this, but I have never used beer to take away aches and pains before, and wow, it really works astonishingly well! While it is true that sweet nourishing booze can take the pain away, this can be a very unhealthy trend for me, my wallet and my liver.
 To some a refreshing beer, to others, the best OTC pain killer available. |
These traps have taken down many chefs before me, and I am sure will continue to do so. But at least I can see the problems now, and I can avoid them. So even though I burned myself on the pizza oven TWICE today, I will be sure not to medicate with Miller High Life. Aloe gel and some Tylenol will do just fine. Taken with about 3 glasses of water of course…
Stumble it!
Chris said,
September 15, 2006 at 12:30 am
I’ve always preferred to award frequent pee’ers the moniker, Little Johnny Thimble-Bladder.
Robert said,
September 15, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Have you lost weight in your new career? Or gained?
Matt said,
September 16, 2006 at 11:23 am
An excellent question. I have actually lost some weight as a chef, simply because I don’t get as much opportunity to eat, and I am on my feet all day as supposed to sitting in front of a computer all day long. I should keep track of this and report on the results. The weight loss has not been dramatic mind you, just a slight shedding of some of the “gratuitous” outside fat. I still drink enough beer to keep my “winter layer” in place.
Boutros said,
September 18, 2006 at 8:02 am
Just looking at that glass of water makes me have to pee.
Eize said,
May 9, 2007 at 10:44 am
Boy, I really am going through your blog, am I? Hehe…
Just curious, but have you ever tried one of those sports drinks during work to get your fluids back, like Gatorade? Deep down body thirst and all that.