Getting to the bottom of this obnoxiously large 1-gallon water jug every day

I am not, by nature, a water drinker. I drink it at the gym in the morning, but after that, it's usually coffee or nothing at all.

I realize this is not a healthy approach to fluid intake, though, so lately I've been trying to up my water consumption by purchasing the big ol' water bottle you see above. I was inspired by my daughter Chloe and my son Jack, both of whom have similarly large H2O containers from which they drink consistently.

This isn't the first time I've tried to take in more water. My inconsistent attempts at becoming more like my dad (who drank water and beer in equally prodigious quantities) stretch back more than 30 years.

When I was marathon training in 2001, for example, I drank a lot of water because I had to in order to keep my body properly hydrated for running dozens of miles a week. The second I crossed the finish line, though, my water drinking plummeted immediately to pre-training levels.

It's not that I don't like water. It's just not a particularly attractive option for me. It's just...you know, water. I can take it or leave it.

Again, though, I understand the health benefits of proper hydration, so I'm giving it another go by setting for myself the daily goal of filling Jumbo the Water Jug and drinking its entire contents. It takes a concerted effort, but I've been doing it.

The inevitable and wholly predictable result, of course, has been an alarming rise in bathroom trips. I have already worn out a path to the men's room at the office. Supposedly your body eventually adjusts to ingesting higher quantities of fluid, but so far my body's only response has been, "Stop drinking so much or else we're going to spend the rest of your life seeking out restrooms."

Actually, finding restrooms has been high on my daily agenda ever since I hit my mid-40s. So that part isn't new.

What is new, however, is the impressive level of bladder control I have developed during work meetings. No longer do I have to rush directly from conference rooms immediately to the nearest urinal.

These days it's more of a controlled trot.

What I'm willing and not willing to do to live a healthy lifestyle

I like to read books about longevity and health. Dr. Michael Roizen is my favorite author in the space, though there are many others – Drs. Joel Fuhrman and Neil Barnard come to mind – who are also go-to sources for this type of information.

Of course, there's a difference between reading about healthy living and, you know, actually following through on it. If you were to ask people who know me well, they would say I am generally a fairly healthy individual. But I'm more acutely aware of the areas in which I fall short than those in which I'm compliant with the latest recommendations around diet, exercise, stress management, etc.

And now in my early (rapidly approaching middle) 50s, I am largely at peace with it all.

At some point, you have to decide what you're willing to sacrifice in the name of better health and what less-than-healthy indulgences you want to maintain in your life. And connected with that, you have to be ready to accept the consequences of those less-than-healthy choices.

I don't mean to suggest that healthy = boring/difficult/burdensome, by the way. That's not necessarily the case.

But the fact is, many of us naturally prefer the bag of chips over the carrot sticks, and sitting on the couch over getting out and walking.

Over the past 15 years, I've had four what I would call "significant" weight losses of 20 or more pounds each. The biggest of those came in 2016, when I started around 217 and got down as low as 166, which in retrospect was way too low for me.

Yet, if you go by the BMI charts – and believe me, I'm well aware of the limitations of BMI as a measurement of overall health – 166 pounds for someone my height is within 10 pounds of being "overweight." So what's the answer?

As I type this, I'm approaching significant weight loss #5. I've dropped about 17 pounds since the first of September through my method of choice, Weight Watchers. It's a system that works well for me whenever I make up my mind to follow it.

I also benefit from the gender biology of weight loss, in which men generally have an easier time dropping pounds than women do. You ladies get screwed in a lot of ways, and this is one of them.

Last Saturday when I weighed in at the local Weight Watchers studio, the scale read 187.2. My official WW goal weight, as prescribed by my primary care doctor a decade ago, is 185. Once I get there, I'll switch to maintenance mode and try to stay around that number for...well, for the rest of my life.

Because you see, when you're someone who has had a number of successful weight losses, it also means you're someone who each time has put the pounds back on. I have never in my adult life been able to maintain a healthy weight for more than a year at a time. So my next big challenge is learning how to keep myself where I should be in terms of overall body mass.

I'm willing to make the mental and physical sacrifices necessary to do that. In fact, here is a complete list of the things I'm willing to do to live as a healthy person:

• Cardio: I power walk (usually just over 12 minutes/mile) five days a week, generally covering a total of 12 miles every seven days. I'm very consistent with this, and it's largely because I love getting out and moving.
• Eat leafy greens, beans, nuts, fruits and veggies: These are all staples of my daily diet, as they should be.
• Don't smoke: Not a problem. True story - I've never even tried it. Not even once. I have never inhaled smoke from anything and have no desire to try it.
• Keep my weight down: See above.

Those are admirable, but they do not cover all of the bases, health-wise. There are other habits we should be forming if we want to live longer, happier lives, at least from a physical standpoint. Here are the things I should be doing that I'm not:

• Strength training: The truth is, I hate lifting weights. I just despise it. I know I should be doing it, I know it has amazing benefits. Yet I can't seem to get myself to do it with any regularity. It's the one thing on my "bad" list that I hope to change. Maybe it will be my 2023 resolution.
• Meditation: I don't "feel" like I'm stressed, but the recommendation is that we should all be doing something to manage stress in our lives. Deep breathing is another popular technique. I don't make the time to do any of it.
• Getting enough sleep: I rarely sleep more than 7 hours, and most of the time it's more like 6 to 6 1/2 for me. I feel OK, though, or at least I think I feel OK, since there may be a higher level of "OK" of which I'm not even aware that I would experience if I just went to bed earlier. But as well as I sleep, I just don't love it as much as a lot of people do. I would rather be up and doing stuff. If there was a way to live without sleeping, I would jump on it. As it is, I should be getting more shuteye.
• Inserting even more healthy foods into my diet: I love fish, but I rarely eat it. Too much trouble buying and cooking it. I also don't do a good job with the "healthy gut" foods like yogurt, kimchi, etc., nor do I drink nearly enough water.
• Having a social life: I hang out mostly with Terry and my son Jack, the two people with whom I live. You're supposed to have a wider social circle than that, and men in particular tend not to be very good about building and maintaining friendships. I don't know, there doesn't seem to be enough time, though I know the reality is that I could make time if I really wanted.

I could go on, but the point is, I miss the mark on more items health-wise than I hit. That doesn't bother me as much as it used to. I'm doing what I can manage, and if that means a few years off the end of an otherwise healthy and happy life, so be it.

Or at least that's what I say now. Check back with me in another decade or two.

I have the hardest time drinking water

You're supposed to drink water. The exact amount seems a bit of a mystery, as you hear different formulas and/or guidelines to figure out how much is right for you. But whatever the actual number, you should be drinking water.

I am not, it must be said, a natural water drinker. I drink water, but I have to be deliberate about it. Some people gravitate toward H2O as their beverage of choice without giving it a second thought. I do it only because I know it's good for me, and even then I'm a little inconsistent in how much I drink each day.

My daughter Chloe bought me the water bottle pictured above as a Father's Day present, and it was a good choice. Being the goal-oriented person I am, the time markings printed on the side of the bottle give me water intake targets to shoot for throughout the day.

Still, if given a choice of something to drink, my inclination is to choose coffee or a green smoothie ahead of water. I generally go with the water, but I don't like it.

People have suggested I add some flavor to the water, whether it's fresh fruit or those flavoring drops you can buy, but neither does anything to increase my enjoyment of it.

Ultimately, I think it's mental. I've convinced myself that drinking water is a chore, and therefore I always see it that way. If I can just get my brain thinking that water will make me into a suave, sophisticated James Bond type, I would be downing gallons of it every day.

I wonder how much water Daniel Craig drinks.

It's not that I don't like pools, I just don't want one

For context, it is important to note that I'm not much of a "water guy." I took swimming lessons only because my mom made me do it, I never wanted to spend as many hours at the city pool as my friends did, and while I can swim to survive, I'm not especially skilled or confident in the water.

I don't hate swimming. It's just that I can take it or leave it.

All of which gives me great admiration for those who are very much water-oriented. Especially those who have their own pools. Whether they're in-ground or above ground, pools are expensive and, it seems to me, difficult to maintain.

But if you're OK with that, then more power to you. Enjoy the heck out of that big bathtub and/or hole in the ground in your backyard!

It's ironic that, of all the family vacations we've taken over the years with the kids, my favorite is probably the beach vacation we took to Delaware five years ago. I loved everything about it, except I hardly went into the ocean. I was perfectly content sitting on the beach reading a book about trench warfare in World War I (that's 100% true).

I've never jet skied, though it looks like a lot of fun. I've never water skied, either, though it also looks like a lot of fun despite the fact that I almost certainly would fall over within seconds.

I put boat ownership in the same category as pool ownership, by the way. There's a whole lifestyle that revolves around boating, though all I see are dollar signs and maintenance problems. But if you love it, that's awesome. Again, it's just not for me.

The one concession I might eventually make is buying a hot tub for our deck. Jared has been after us to do that for years now, and I might be willing to relent there. But someone else is going to take care of it. I got swindled into taking care of five cats many years ago, and I'm not going to fall for that trick again.

You're supposed to drink water and I hate drinking water

There's a rule of thumb that says you're supposed to drink 157 glasses of water a day or something, and I drink one.

Seriously, I drink one glass of water a day and I do it in the morning when I'm taking my vitamins.

Sometimes I have water with dinner, too.

Beyond that, it's pretty much coffee or nothing when it comes to beverages for me.

I realize what a bad thing this is for my body, and that we need to keep ourselves hydrated. I just don't like water. I have to force myself to drink it.

When I trained for a marathon 14 years ago, I downed water by the gallon because I had to. Now that my running schedule is considerably more tame, I've abandoned the water.

Again, I know this isn't good judgment. There just isn't anything about the water-drinking experience that I enjoy.

Let's set aside the whole "there's no taste to it" thing. That's bad enough in itself. Water drinking makes me go to the bathroom a lot. A LOT.

"That's OK," you might say, "your body will adjust. Give it time."

I have given it time before, and my body never adjusts. I drink one glass of water and I'm headed to the bathroom three times in the next 30-45 minutes. I'm not kidding. It's like I drink a small quantity of water, and my body uses it to spontaneously manufacture more water. It's the only explanation.

Do you drink water? How much? How do you do it? My dad used to drink huge cupfuls of water all the time. It just baffles me how people manage this.

A day at the beach is no day at the beach

I'm sitting at the computer in a wet bathing suit as I type this, having just returned from a couple of hours at the beach with my family.

This is a relatively rare occurrence for us, you understand, or at least it is for me. I go to the beach approximately once a year. I swim in a pool maybe once or twice in that same year.

And that's about it for me, as far as water recreation goes.

It's not that I don't like the water, it's just...well, yes, actually it is that I don't like the water. And I know when it all started for me.

Like suburban moms everywhere back in the 70s, my mom made me take swimming lessons at the local pool one summer. It was good for me, and better yet, I think it may have been free. Or at least it was very, very low cost. So hey, why not?

Swimming lessons were given in "phases" back then. Phase I encompassed the basics, like opening your eyes underwater and reciting water safety rules or something. I cruised through that. And Phase II wasn't much tougher, though I'm not sure how I passed because I'm pretty sure it required you to float on your back, and to this day I cannot float on my back.

I'm one of the few people I know of whom this is true, by the way. Most folks just instinctively know how to float on their backs. But I sink like a rock. My wife is mystified by this, as well she should be. I defy all commonly accepted laws of physics.

Regardless, they passed me through both Phase II and Phase III in fairly short order, though I can't remember what you had to do to get through Phase III.

The trouble came with Phase IV, which was when they taught you to do the American crawl (also known as the "front crawl," or "just plain old swimming.") This is a skill I could not master. It is a skill I still haven't mastered some three decades later.

I don't know why, but there was something about the simultaneous need to kick, stroke and turn your head in rhythm in order to breathe that just stopped me cold. Couldn't do it then, can't do it now. I tried. Oh yes, I tried. But they wouldn't pass me beyond Phase IV because I simply couldn't learn the skill, no matter how hard they tried to teach me.

You have to understand, I was not especially well equipped at that point in my life to deal with failure. Not getting something right on the first try was foreign to me.

So when I repeatedly failed to pass the test to get out of Phase IV, I began to hate swimming lessons. And in turn, I began to hate the water.

The result is that I still don't like spending more than 10 consecutive minutes in any body of water, be it a kiddie pool or a major ocean.

Which isn't a good thing when you live in Ohio, where we have real "summer" for only about 2 1/2 months out of every year. When it's warm enough to swim, people here really, really get into swimming. And if you don't match their enthusiasm for it, they do little to hide their contempt for you.

The stereotypical Ohio vacation is to travel to a body of water and spend a week there doing whatever it is that normal, water-loving people do. My family doesn't take those kinds of vacations, and it's mostly because of me.

In addition to my low-level swimming skills, I should also mention that water always makes me cold. Always. I don't care if it's 95 degrees outside and the water is at bath temperature, I will still be cold.

Having lost a decent amount of weight in the past year doesn't help in this department. Previously, I at least had some insulation that kept my body temperature from falling into the hypothermic range. Now I just look at the water and my temp falls several degrees south of 98.6.

There's also the little matter of not really liking to have my shirt off in public, which I've mentioned before.

The only really enjoyable part of a trip to the beach for me is playing football catch with my son Jared. This is actually fun, or at least it's fun for 10 minutes until my 43-year-old rotator cuff catches my attention and asks, "Um, what exactly do you think you're doing?" And then I have to stop.

Other than that, though, a trip to the beach means, for me, being cold and making concerted efforts not to drown. This is not, by any stretch, a "relaxing" activity.

Which is why I should be living in Kansas or some other severely landlocked state, just so I wouldn't feel so pressured every summer to swim and fake enthusiasm for all things aquatic. As far as I'm concerned, summer can't end fast enough.