Lose That Water Weight
You know, sometimes when people talk about weight loss and what they’ve managed to accomplish with their weight loss, someone will turn up their nose and say “Yeah, but that’s just water weight. That’s easy to lose.”
Really? Then why haven’t you done it? Listen, folks, I’ll be the first person to tell you not to bother with those silly seaweed wrap things that promise to make you lose insane amounts of “inches” in just an hour or so. That’s just plain dehydration, and depriving your vital tissues of the fluids they actually need to survive and thrive. As soon as you start drinking water, you’ll just plump back up.
However, there’s a difference between that and losing excess water weight. This may sound strange, but there’s a lot of people out there carrying around a ton of weight that isn’t fat, it’s fluid.
You know what? That’s still a problem. Think about it. No matter if it’s fat or fluid, you still have to haul all of that extra weight around. Think of the strain having to move an extra twenty or thirty pounds puts on your system- your heart, your blood vessels, your joints, everything. If you don’t believe me, pick up a twenty pound dumbbell and start walking around for a while. Then set it down. Big difference, right?
Plus, all of that stagnant fluid is going to tax your circulatory system, just in a fluid dynamics/how do I push blood around with this pressure backing me up sort of way. Carrying all that extra fluid can press on internal structures and make the entire internal workings of the body harder to do. I’ve even had patients who couldn’t lie flat on an exam table because their bloated belly pushed up into their chest and began to smother them.
WHY THE EXTRA WATER WEIGHT?
So where’s all this extra fluid coming from? Shouldn’t we just pee it out, if it’s water and we don’t need it?
When things are working right, we do. But, when certain chemistry in our body gets out of balance, it holds the fluid in and makes us swell up like a balloon.
Basically, what happens is the amount of fluid in the circulatory system increases, which makes some of it push or “leak” out of the tiny little vessels called capillaries (think of them like the tiniest twigs on a tree branch). This leaked fluid accumulates in areas of the body where it isn’t useful or functional… in other words, you’re not extra-hydrated. Instead, the fluid sort of sits there and sloshes around uselessly. Lovely.
The main culprit behind excess water weight is the balance between potassium and sodium. Namely, we’ve got way too much sodium, and not enough potassium. Sodium (salt) is added to just about every refined food out there- yet another reason I tell people to stick to a whole foods diet. If it’s in a box or a can, odds are, it’s had salt added to it.
It isn’t even always “salt”. Food manufacturers are sneaky and call salt by different names, or especially, like to use salt-based chemicals to artificially make their foods tastier. Most of you have heard of MSG (monosodium glutamate), which is a flavor enhancer. I could write a whole article just on the horrible health effects of MSG, but suffice it to say for today’s purposes, it’s a salt- monoSODIUM glutamate.
This stuff is packed into EVERYTHING. Seriously. It’s hard to find a packaged food that hasn’t had MSG added to it. And there’s a reason why- it works. It takes a bland food and makes the taste “pop”. And a food manufacturer’s goal is to make food tasty so you buy a lot of it. Health concerns really don’t enter into the equation.
BALANCE, YOUNG ONE. POTASSIUM/SODIUM BALANCE.
Your body uses sodium and potassium in some complicated chemical shenanigans in your cells- it’s not really important to go into the details, but it has to do with how the body generates the electrical charge that travels down a nerve. The point is, you need this stuff. But, you need it in a balanced ratio- if sodium starts to predominate, you’ll start to retain fluid and turn into Puff Daddy.
Since you’ve already read the paragraphs above about how we suck down salt like it’s our job, it is probably no shock to hear that most of us are out of balance with these vital nutrients. But it’s more than just a sodium overuse- it’s also a lack of potassium.
There’s the obvious. Our diets are crap, mostly, and don’t have a lot of the fruits and vegetables that are packed full of potassium. But there’s more. Refined sugar, as a consequence of how our body metabolizes it, sucks potassium out of the body with a vengeance. Along with salt, sugar is added to an insane amount of our food. Pretty much anything processed has had some sort of sugar added to it.
I’ve had people tell me that after they eat Chinese food (which has a lot of MSG), they notice their rings get tighter on their fingers because they swell up. For me, I notice that on my cheat day (when I let myself loose on the sugar), I not only get thirsty, I actually feel a little swollen the next day. The next day, as I cut out the sugar and get many vegetables in my belly, I start peeing like crazy and that fluid is gone pretty quickly.
In extreme cases, you can see edema (fluid retention) in the ankles get so bad, that if you press on it with a finger, the skin dimples in and STAYS THAT WAY… at least for a moment or two. Now, when edema gets this bad, it’s often a sign of a side effect of medication or a more serious medical condition, but as people get fatter and fatter in this country, you’re seeing it more and more. It’s going to get hard to tell if people have one of these edema-causing conditions or are simply obese and retaining massive amounts of fluid due to an out of control sodium/potassium balance.
HOW TO LOSE THE WATER WEIGHT
Now that you’ve read this far, the solution is fairly simple. Restore the potassium/sodium balance. Easy for me to say, right?
Actually, it isn’t terribly complicated to do. Cut out the salt and the sugar, and increase the amount of green vegetables in your diet (they have a lot of potassium in them).
Hey! I didn’t say it was EASY, I said it wasn’t complicated!
As many of you consistent HealthyAndy.com readers know, I constantly advocate a whole foods diet. Some people like to call it a “primal diet”, or a “stone age diet”… really, I don’t care what you call it, as long as you do it. Whole foods means unprocessed foods; fruits and vegetables (unprocessed, preferably raw), meats, nuts, eggs. The more a food is altered, the less “whole” it is.
Transitioning to a whole foods diet will fix all kinds of things for you, but since we’re talking water weight…. first off, there’s no added sugar or salt. If you eat an apple, there’s no MSG added. So there’s no loss of potassium, no skyrocketing intake of sodium, and all is well in the universe. It’s nearly impossible to track every crazy chemical added to refined or processed foods, so don’t even try. You’ll lose. Just avoid the issue, by sticking to whole foods.
You’ll be shocked how fast you can lose water weight if you follow a strictly whole foods diet. Take me as an example. I will typically weigh five pounds heavier early in the week (right after my cheat day) then I do at the end of the week (after I’ve been eating nothing but whole foods all week). It isn’t fat, folks. That’s all water weight. That’s the effects of ONE DAY of salt and sugar and refined foods… and that’s also how quickly it can flush out of the system.
The bottom line is, you don’t want to walk around swollen up like a sponge with excess fluid. It makes you look thick and squishy, it’s harder on your health, and is all-around a downer. So stick to a whole foods diet, and get lighter, faster.
Do you notice any foods that make you get puffy and swollen (they usually make you tired and thirsty as well)? Let me know in the comments section below!
Stay healthy!