Drinking 2 Litres of Water a Day Won’t Change Your Life

Cellulite is a bitch.

Little dimples, staring back at me in the mirror with a look as if to say “Oh, sorry you don’t want us to hang around here?”.

I remember it’s something that crossed my mind whilst having sex with one of my first boyfriends. Wondering if he too was speaking to the uneven skin texture that spread over the back of my thighs.

Being sixteen (probably fifteen) the chances are I was not having the most thrilling sex of my life. Thinking constantly about angles, how I looked and if I managed to get everything with my ASDAs own disposable razor. Add a dash of teenage insecurity and we’ve got a recipe for really substandard sex.

Uneducated and thinking the cellulite was probably formed due to me sitting down, playing sims too much mixed with the Lambrini I was drinking at house parties. I went to look for answers.

Cosmopolitan was the search engine of choice and she told me to drink two litres of water a day. My life would be spot and cellulite free. I would be happy ever more.

Every day for the last decade I have drank at least one and a half litres of water. After a while, these things become habit and you carry out the task with little effort. Somewhere down the line I forgot I was drinking to banish ‘Celia the cellulite’ and looking in the mirror this morning she is still very much there, basking in her glory, on my ass.

Sitting back onto Celia, I then started thinking about all the other things I now do, or have done, because someone, somewhere told me to. I’ve been promised pins like Victoria Beckham and hair like Jennifer Anniston but each and every one failed to deliver the goods.

Drinking copious amounts of water per day did not keep me spot or cellulite free. I never suffer with headaches, which perhaps is a side effect of the water intake but let’s be honest, not nearly as satisfying a result as cellulite free legs.

You’ve gone through a breakup? Do not forget to drink your water.

Your Nan died? Stay hydrated in this difficult time.

Funnily enough, I’ve decided we tell each other to hydrate because it’s the only thing we know that is definitely important. One of the activities that must be carried out or we will be leaving this world and entering the next. We tell people we care about to drink water because quite frankly we want them to be okay, to be alive, and a few glasses every now and again will do that for a human.

Coconut oil was something I read about on a fitness Instagram page. It is expensive. I’ve brought at least twenty tubs of it in my life. Apparently if you use it to fry your food it does not give you cancer or make the thing your frying taste like coconut. I’m pretty sure claim number one is not true. But the second? You and I both know this is false. It makes everything taste like coconut even though I pretend to others it doesn’t.

Coconut oil is not the answer to everything. I have one friend that can’t even use the stuff. What on earth are we going to tell her when she complains of dry skin, split ends or she’s struggling to pay her rent?

When my ex-partner left me for a seventeen-year-old, I was not running downstairs to liberally apply coconut oil to my aching heart. When we were abruptly removed from our house in the early hours of the morning once, I did not rush to the kitchen cupboard to pack my multi-talented jar of coconut oil.

Speaking of edible items, there are a pack of Chia seeds in my cupboard that I hate on a personal level. I always make myself laugh when I think about the loathing I have for certain inanimate objects. The easy close label has long lost its stickiness and every now again, just to check I still have a temper it likes to fall out of the cupboard and drop those little seeds everywhere. They stick to everything; have an odd consistency and I would rather have cake. Cleaning up the aftermath and feebly attempting to close the packet I put them back in the cupboard in the same place. I will see you again in a few months.

To my knowledge, my lack of eating fancy super foods has not left me nutrient deficient and it probably won’t you either. Yes, you need vegetables, we know this. But Kale? Goji berries? Frog spawn? I’m not so sure. If it came down to buying a bottle of wine, or a packet of Chia seeds I know fully well who would be coming home with me.

Still, over a decade after I read that Cosmo article that promised me perfect pins, I have moments when I just believe things to be true. I read something, absorb the information and it sits there in the back of my mind to one day surface. We cannot assume everything we read about being happy, healthy and getting our ducks in a row is going to be true, or helpful. These things do make for quite a good topic of conversation, however.

Drinking two litres of water a day has not answered my prayers, but I guess it has kept me alive, which is something.