Hydration Is Boring — So Let Soup Do the Work
Roughly a fifth of your daily fluid comes from food. Three habits that beat any drinking app — and a twenty-minute red lentil soup.
Headache at four in the afternoon, foggy head in a meeting, a strange craving for biscuits: for years I treated all of that as a character flaw. Very often it was a glass of water.
Adults need roughly 1.5 to 2 litres of fluid a day, more when it is hot or when you have been on a mat for ninety minutes. About a fifth of it arrives through food — which is where soup comes in.
Three habits that work better than an app
- One glass before every hot drink. Coffee is not the enemy, but pairing it with water means you drink four or five glasses a day without thinking.
- A jug, not a bottle. Put a full jug on the desk in the morning. Seeing how much is left beats remembering how much you drank.
- Make it worth drinking. Cucumber, mint, a strip of lemon peel, or cold rooibos. Flavour is the cheapest adherence trick there is.
Check your urine colour rather than counting millilitres: pale straw is fine, apple juice is not. That is the whole science, honestly.
Half of what I once called a slump was dehydration with better marketing.
Anna
And then there is soup
A bowl of soup is water you can chew: fluid, electrolytes, fibre and protein in the same spoon. This red lentil soup takes twenty minutes, uses things I always have in the cupboard, and has rescued more of my evenings than any other recipe I own.
Twenty-Minute Red Lentil Soup with Lemon
Ingredients
- 250 g red lentils, rinsed
- 1 piece onion, diced
- 2 clove garlic, sliced
- 1 tbsp grated fresh ginger
- 2 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp turmeric
- 1200 ml vegetable stock
- 200 ml coconut milk
- 1 piece lemon, juiced
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 handful coriander or parsley, chopped
Method
Soften the onion in the oil for five minutes. Add garlic, ginger, cumin and turmeric and stir for one minute until fragrant.
Add lentils and stock. Simmer 15 minutes, until the lentils have completely collapsed.
Stir in the coconut milk, then blend smooth or leave rustic — both are correct.
Season generously with salt and all the lemon juice. Serve with herbs and flatbread.
Tip
Do not skip the lemon: without acid the soup tastes flat and dull. If it thickens in the fridge, loosen it with hot water rather than more stock.