I have been teased about drinking hot water for as long as I’ve been drinking hot water.
“Hot water?” People will say. “Just hot water?”
“Yep, just hot water.”
“That’s weird.”
“Not really,” I’ll say. “Hot water is delicious. It warms you up. It’s like a shower for your insides.”
“You’re not okay.”
That’s pretty much how that conversation goes, but I’m not about to be peer-pressured out of my hot water habit.
My family is Italian, and, growing up, I can definitely remember being offered canarino after a big meal, which is just hot water poured over a lemon peel or slice of lemon and served with a promise that it has the magical power to undo the effects of gluttony. But, then again, it can’t hurt. So maybe the habit started there, and at some point the lemon became very optional. I drink a lot of tea—black, herbal, green—and I guess you can think of hot water as tea without the tea bag, but that doesn’t mean it’s lacking anything. I choose hot water even when there’s plenty of herbal tea in the house, and I like it to be really, truly hot. My favorite temperature is just shy of tongue-burning, and because I like knowing things exactly, I’ve taken the temperature. In case you’re wondering, 180° is my ideal hotness.
My Italian ancestors aren’t the only ones who believed in the digestive powers of a cup of hot water. It’s an ancient ayurvedic method believed to aid digestion, encourage deep hydration, and generally help you detox. I believe those claims to be true, but if I drank hot water for the health benefits, I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I do. Like taking a daily probiotic, or Vitamin D, or fish oil, it would be a thing I did because I knew it was good for me but stopped doing when the habit didn’t take.
The hot water is, at this point, a deeply ingrained habit. I have a hot-water kettle in my office, and I throw the teapot on at home in the evening so I can bring a sturdy glass of hot water to bed. For a while, I was into adding fennel seeds to it, which is good for digestion and you can chew on the plumped seeds when you get to the bottom. But, day in and day out, it’s just the water.
I switch to room-temperature water when it starts to get warm out and switch back to hot water in the fall, and my oldest friends know me well enough to say, “Ah, it’s hot water season again.” At this point in life, I’ve got plenty of hot-water drinkers in my orbit. Many of my colleagues are in on it—we exchange knowing glances when we see steam unfurling from each other's cups in a meeting. I converted my husband a long time ago. And my kids are being indoctrinated with the mythic healing properties of a canarino for a belly ache. Let’s face it—these habits won’t get passed down through generations if you don’t start them young.