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Having trouble finding a healthy gift for that “hard-to-buy-for” friend? Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard have just the thing for you! Hydration is the foundation of a healthy lifestyle. But life happens, and people get busy, so it’s easy to forget a drink or even find more convenient yet unhealthy alternatives. Today’s next little thing is the smart water bottle that can help with that! Tom and Tracy discuss why the Hidrate Bottle is not only an excellent product to own but a great product to gift with fun features to get you excited. Learn how they’ve been using their Hidrate bottles by tuning in!

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We Found the Absolutely Best Healthy Gift for That Hard to Buy for Friend

We’re going to talk about something I use every day, Tom. How about you?

Now I do, it was your thing and you assimilated me into it. I have to say, while I use it and I feel it’s good, I also feel like this is maybe bringing tech into something that maybe didn’t need tech. I get some value out of it. Let’s share with everybody what we’re talking about.

We’re going to talk about the Hidrate water bottles. I have given it out.

Yours is melded in and mine is more printed on the side of it and I have a different model than you do.

Lights up. Let’s see if I can get it to go. I didn’t drink anything.

It was the environmental aspect that got me on board with the Hidrate bottle. Click To Tweet

That’s the thing. I drank something and I’m watching it. These bottles are supposed to help you track how much water you’re drinking. It works. There you go.

It was lightened up.

I hope yours lit up big enough.

I’ll do it again when it lights up on me.

Yours is made of plastic. The whole bottle illuminates mine.

It’s not. The bottle inside is glass but it has one of those rubbery coverings on it, those silicone coverings.

Mine is an aluminum bottle. It’s metal but the bottom has an LED light ring that lights up. The whole bottle on mine doesn’t line up. The point of this is it’s meant to be a health and wellness product and to make sure you’re drinking enough and hydrating your body throughout the day. If you work nonstop as Tracy and I do, you can completely forget to hydrate.

Honestly, probably 3 or 4 workdays a week, I don’t even stop to eat lunch. I’m grabbing a protein bar or something to eat in between calls because that’s all I can squeeze in. Forgetting to drink also can happen. What’s interesting about these bottles is that it not only tracks how much you’re hydrating throughout the day and you can set a goal and see if you’re meeting it and you’re hydrating enough. It will light up periodically to remind you, “I’m here. You need to drink more.”

“You forgot.”

The app will nudge me with alerts if you let it.

 

There are multiple settings in the app. There are the settings where you can have your bottle glow reminders like mine just glowed. When I set my bottle glow reminder, it lights up again. That’s because I’m going there and you can set the glow type to low, medium or high so it’s like how bright is it?

You might not want it high if you’re putting it in your bedroom. You can say, “Always remind me or only when I’m behind. Glow when I take a drink. Glow when I meet my goal.” Every time I drink, mine glows. I usually have it to remind me only when I’m behind for the day. I have a goal of how much water I want to drink for the day and mine only glows and reminds me when I’m behind on that goal. It will glow in the morning.

I’ll do a glow.

Go into the glow reminders set.

Mine has a reminder that’s what it looks like and around the bottom of it, which is quite effective. I don’t think it needs to necessarily be the entire bottle. Although, when you told me you were buying one for me, I expected to get one like yours and I had glow envy at one point because like, “My whole bottle doesn’t light up. It’s only that ring at the bottom.

I thought, “It’s black and metal you’ll like it better.” Stylistically, I was gone for it but now this is the difference. The metal ones have a difference and the one that Tom has is rechargeable. You have to hook it and recharge the battery. This one has a watch battery.

Here’s the bottom drops out and it’s a thick coin cell.

This is easily replaceable. I’ve had mine since December 2020 and I have replaced it once so you can see that coin cell in there.

That’s a pretty thick coin cell and it’s like 0.25 inches thick. It must last quite a while.

I bought ten of them on Amazon for $20 or something. The cells still aren’t expensive for the batteries. I’ve got ten of them to replace because I thought, “I’ll need to replace it more often,” but I actually haven’t.

On mine, you twist and drop out. This is the entire electronic guts of my bottle. The bottom of the bottle you can see there. This contains the battery and the LED lights that illuminate this ring. There’s a little USB cord that connects to these contacts to charge it. You can take the bottle and still use it. You don’t have to leave the bottle somewhere charging. You can take out the bottom and charge it.

I usually try to do it overnight and it seems about once a week, maybe a little less frequently than that. Maybe it goes 8 to 9 days sometimes before I need to charge it. To think of it as weekly charging makes the most sense. I was annoyed by that, honestly. I would have rather had your bottle and have an extra battery handy especially when I travel.

That I don’t have to bring this charging cord and remember that. To me, I respect the environment and the idea of rechargeable batteries makes perfect sense. Coin cells are problematic in a lot of other ways especially if you have young children around the house, although that’s pretty hard to open. You have to intend to open it.

You really need to consistently hydrate throughout the day. The bottle was a great reminder. Click To Tweet

You have to twist it and open it. The thing is that yours is a little bit easier to wash because this one you have to be a little more careful with so I hand wash it. It makes it easier because then I don’t have to worry about the battery cover. I don’t put it in the dishwasher. Yours, you can remove that whole piece and put it in the dishwasher.

That is a cleaning convenience as well but you only touch the top. Rinsing out the inside and doing a decent job of scrubbing and then letting it dry. I’ve ticked the top piece where I put my mouth into the dishwasher regularly. That’s the cleaning part thinking about that. I’ve given this one as a gift to all our employees at one time and they loved it because it’s not an inexpensive bottle.

This is about a $50 to $60 bottle depending on which version you buy. It’s not an inexpensive gift but it feels special and it feels like you care. A couple of our employees are health conscious and so giving this gift was an acknowledgment of that. I knew that. That’s what made it even better when I gave him this gift and then it’s a lot of fun and they said the same thing.

Whitney Lauritsen is one of them. You have seen her before on some of our shows where we’ve done episodes with her. She has the podcast This Might Get Uncomfortable, which is very health-conscious and focused on all the different things you need to do to be healthy and well and how difficult some of those things are.

Staying hydrated is one of them. It’s one so easy to forget and then think, “I’ll consume all my water at the end of the day and it’ll be fine and it’s not.” You need to consistently hydrate throughout the day. The bottle was a great reminder for her. She loves it. She’s like, “I have probably sold more of these bottles than I ever imagined from using it and people asking me about it.”

We feel the same way about it. It’s a great gift idea especially for that adult that you want to give a gift to that’s hard to buy for or maybe you don’t know a lot about them. This is usually a pretty easy gift. It shows that you care about them. It’s fun. It’s a good conversation piece. It covers all those fun gift-giving things that we’ve talked about before on this show.

It does. I want our readers to understand, I’ve become a fan. I definitely was not an early adopter. When you first got them, I’m like, “Really?” That’s how I felt about it at first before I tried it but I’ve become a fan. I want to say that now because I’m going to play a little devil’s advocate here on this water bottle. Tracy and I are water drinkers. That’s the primary liquid we drink throughout the day in our home. We consume an awful lot of water. We don’t drink soda. We don’t drink juices.

We drink tea.

We do drink tea, water and a very occasional glass of wine or a Margarita.

Let’s slip in the Margarita.

You got to give the tequila some love.

My rule for this is just so everybody understands there. I would much rather eat my calories than drink them so that’s why none of those other things are there.

The interesting thing about the Hidrate bottle is that it has an app, it tracks how much you’re drinking each day and you have these goals. It tracks it over time. The thing for me, they’re trying to gamify it, these alerts you get on their phone, are trying to be a little funny to remind you. If you look at your app, if you allow it to give you push notifications, that tells little jokes and reminds you to drink your water. It’s a little fun. It’s gamifying it a little bit.

It works because our daughters want them. Our younger daughters want them and I’m like, “I’m not buying you a $50 bottle for you to lose it at school.” It’s not going to happen. They need to make a less expensive kid’s one but they love the glowing. It seems fun to them and it’s a good way because they don’t drink enough, I discovered this summer as we spend a lot of time with them.

 

A lot of people don’t. An awful lot of the population is under-hydrated for one reason or another but it’s easy to say we’re a little older now. I used to drink ridiculous amounts of Diet Coke growing up. It’s now years since I’ve been completely free of diet soda or anything. I primarily drink water and I enjoy it. Here’s what I wanted to mention. We’d used to drink a lot of bottles of water and because the water out of our tap, while its quality from a chemistry perspective is good. We didn’t care for the taste that much.

It had a weird taste.

We were constantly washing an awful lot of glasses, which is not necessarily a bad thing but also, they’re open, knocking them over, spilling them and bottles are convenient.

I don’t like to have an open bottle or open cup on my computer. I just don’t. It makes me nervous on my desk.

 

I understand that and the environmental impact of all of those bottles. We would go to Costco a couple of times a month and buy a couple of 40 packs of water bottles. I even have to say or I liked my Fiji Water, which I would splurge on sometimes at Costco. Our daughter would call that our bougie water. She’s like, “That’s really fancy. That’s your bougie water, fancy water.”

That stuff tastes better than anything but it’s very expensive. It was more the environmental aspect that got me on board with the Hidrate bottle. Trying it out. We decided, “Let’s install a reverse osmosis water system in our home for having clean and healthy drinking water and there’s also this mineralizer that puts good minerals back into the water.”

I have to say I like how it tastes and that’s become now a way of life for us and we’re not spending money on water. We’re using our municipal water supply. It’s got a reverse osmosis system and a tap. We have these 2.5-gallon jugs, a couple of them that we’ll fill with reverse osmosis water. We put it in the fridge so it’s cold and then refill our Hidrate bottles and do it all the time.

The other thing about the Hidrate, you can’t obsess about it because sometimes you’re on the go. You’re traveling. You have to get a bottle of water while you’re out because you’re thirsty and you don’t have your Hidrate bottle with you. You forgot to bring it or you go to Starbucks and you get a tea and so you don’t drink as much water. You can’t obsess about the total hydrate number in the day. It’s a good thing. We’re healthier for doing it.

It's not an inexpensive gift, but it feels special, and it feels like you care. Click To Tweet

Some of us do have to obsess about it. I check mine all the time. Like, “Did I make my goal for the day? How did I do?” It’s more of an assessment. I’m not saying like, “I better drink 2 more ounces now.” I don’t do that but I’m looking at it to say like, “Is that why I’m not feeling great? Is this why I have a little headache at the end of the day. Maybe I didn’t drink enough water.”

I’m looking at it from a health perspective and it is something that I do watch because I can tell the difference now when I don’t drink enough water on a given day. Everyone’s on their own on how they want to look at that but if this is something that interests you, you want to track your water usage. This is super easy and simple. If you want to give a great gift for the health-conscious, for someone to just let them know that you care about their wellbeing, this is a great gift to give. I highly recommend the Hidrate water bottle.

 

Tracy, you’ve sold me. You’ve convinced me but it’s interesting. My personality type, I probably wouldn’t have sought this out. It had to be a gift for me. That’s a really important thing, too. If it’s your thing, by all means, get it and then maybe be an evangelist like Tracy and give it as gifts to others because that will guilt them into trying it and then they’ll probably like it. I’ve become a fan. It’s a great one. For those of you that have an interest, go to TheNextLittleThingPod.com and check out the blog post for this episode where you can find the right one if you’re interested in this brand we’re talking about.

Until next time when we bring you another Next Little Thing.

 

Important Links

• Hidrate
• This Might Get Uncomfortable
• App – Hidrate app