Summer's Quiet Test: What Your Body Already Knows
There is a particular kind of heat in Valletta in June — not aggressive, but relentless.
Summer's Quiet Test: What Your Body Already Knows
There is a particular kind of heat in Valletta in June — not aggressive, but relentless. It finds you. It fills the space between buildings and sits in the stone long after the sun has moved. I have lived in equatorial cities, in the kind of heat that announces itself dramatically, and I have learned that the Mediterranean version is more insidious precisely because it feels manageable right up until it doesn't.
Which brings me to something I have been thinking about as the temperature climbs: most of us are walking around in summer with at least one variable we are not accounting for.
If you are on a GLP-1 medication — semaglutide, tirzepatide, anything in that class — heat is a more significant consideration than your doctor may have flagged in a rushed appointment. These drugs suppress thirst. Not dramatically, not obviously, but enough that your body's natural alarm system becomes quieter than it should be. You feel fine. You are not fine. The gap between the two is where heat exhaustion lives.
This is not a reason to stop the medication. It is a reason to drink water before you are thirsty, which is, frankly, good advice for everyone but is more urgent for this group. The physiology is straightforward: GLP-1 receptors exist in the hypothalamus, which regulates both appetite and thirst. Suppress one, you partially suppress the other. Add to that the reduced sweating some people report, and summer becomes a system that requires more conscious management than the body will spontaneously provide.
What I notice in people who handle heat well — in Nairobi, in Singapore, in this specific city where the harbour holds heat like cupped hands — is that they are not doing anything complicated. They are drinking consistently. They are eating foods with high water content. They are not waiting for the feeling of thirst to tell them something is wrong, because in high heat, that signal arrives late.
Watermelon, as it happens, is not merely folklore. The citrulline in it converts to arginine, which supports blood vessel flexibility. The lycopene content is genuinely cardioprotective. The water content — about 92 percent — does exactly what it sounds like it does. It is one of the few instances where the thing that tastes like summer is also doing something structurally useful for your cardiovascular system.
The one thing you can actually do: set a reminder to drink 250ml of water every ninety minutes tomorrow, regardless of thirst. Do it for three days and notice whether you feel different by afternoon. You probably will.
