How to drink more water?

It's taken me four months to write this blog post. I feel the need to apologise. My absence from the Internet lately can be explained by a few quick words; winter, cough, lack of sleep, 45 hour work weeks, my birthday, a fabulous new internet project (watch this space), the financial year-end (I'm an accountant by day) and a winter holiday. I could tell you more about all of those things, but I figure you probably don't care a long as I stop waffling and get to the point.

Far more interesting is the purpose of this post - to share my discovery this week of how I can drink more water.

It's on everyone's New Years resolution list every year; to drink more water. We all know we are supposed to drink around 10 glasses a day. We all generally fail miserably. 10 cups of coffee and/or tea maybe yes. But that's still a tall order.

Let's face it, water generally doesn't taste that good. Some of us are lucky enough to have water flowing from our taps that can be drunk straight from the tap and is fairly palatable. But many places of work in the UK won't have the same water supply, and many taps specifically have labels above them saying "not drinking water"; though in an emergency you probably would anyway.

Cordials are good at making water taste of something else, but they are full of sugar and E-numbers and don't really appeal to me. I actually like drinking bottled water, but 10 bottles of Evian a day would quickly bankrupt me. I'd be smooth skinned but incredibly poor.

Funny then, that this week I have gone from hardly drinking anything other than coffee, tea and the occasional fruit juice, to drinking 3 or 4 full bottles of water.

The bottles in this case are not bought bottles. I have discovered a refillable water bottle that works for me even though it's only filled with tap water.

This is not an advertising feature. I'm not going to tell you the type of bottle I found, purely because it may not be the right one for you. But for me it's great. It has a straw inside, so you don't have to tip up the bottle. It keeps cold water, from a tap, cold for hours. The water tastes nice, and weirdly you find yourself drinking far more each time you sip through the straw than you would sip from a glass.

I've never used a purpose designed refillable water bottle before.

I don't know why.

It would appear that this water bottle provides me with the solution I was looking for.

Suddenly without trying I am drinking more water.

I would advise anyone looking for a way to increase their water intake to try out a different water bottle.

There are plenty on the market, some even with special filters. They are not even that expensive.

Let me know how you get on. I'd love to hear if it helped and even if it didn't.