I have noticed recently that the ring I am wearing no longer fits as well as it used to. Over the same period I have had several events mess with my regular routine, including my regular behaviours around drinking water and automatically staying hydrated, locally the seasons have changed and at the same time I have lost around 10% of my body weight, and heavily modified my diet and exercise routine.
Through some quick searching I have a short list of common causes of rings not fitting.
- Pollen and other allergens
- weather features (humid, cold – shrink, hot – expand)
- dehydration
- circulation problems, and other major health changes (pregnancy, quit smoking, stroke or heart problems, major weight change)
I am motivated to believe that the cause of my ring not fitting is related to dehydration and none of the other causes that it could possibly be. If that is the case, and if this information can be used by other people, I have found a quick, easy, analog detection method for dehydration (where existing methods are not great).
I assume that if my ring is loose, I am in need of hydration. I plan to test this premise over the next several months and will publish what I find.
This does seem too easy, so I suspect I am missing details in my simple theory. For example – the effect size of other causes of variability in finger size, (e.g. weight loss, the weather)
Meta: this took 30mins to write.
