Sodium And Its Impact On Our Diet

“Hey everybody! In today’s Q and A, I’m going to go over sodium. A question was asked in the group by Tara. “What happens when you eliminate salt then, you get really sensitive to when you add it back into your diet, you’re noticing things like your fingers swelling up…” So I’m going to give you the down-low on the sodium today.

All right. We’re going to get right into it. So, first thing to note, if you have been eliminating processed foods, let’s say you’ve been consistently eating a whole, whole foods now for a month or so. You are not going to have as much sodium in your body as you would have before on a heavily processed food diet, heavily processed foods contain, hundreds times more sodium and salt, things like that to preserve them than a natural whole source of food. So anything that really is coming in a can package things like that…for example, like a can of chicken, even though it’s chicken, there’s going to be a lot of sodium in there because it is processed to preserve it longer. 

So if you’ve cut that back out and then you add it back in and you’re getting blasted with that much sodium, you may experience some swelling especially around the joints. It’s very common for people to feel it in their fingers, their knees, their ankles, they’ll see when they take off their socks. There’ll be like a swelling line on most. So if you’ve eliminated processed foods and then you reintroduce, you know, you have a day where you eat a lot of processed foods expect that swelling to occur.

Now with sodium, if you have been maintaining a healthy nutritional style of eating, meaning you’re eating whole foods consistently, you’re going to still want to include sodium, especially to those of you that are training, especially training high intensity multiple times a week.

(You’re gonna) want to add in sodium actually. So lightly salt, your food. You shouldn’t know the swelling from that, and you actually should get a performance benefit in the gym. There are some supplements that can benefit you with that element is one. You can look that up as an electrolyte supplement, it has lots of sodium in there. But again, I would only recommend salting your foods or taking supplements like that if you have eliminated processed foods and you’ve eliminated them for a good while now. So that’s kind of it on sodium. You do need it. It is perfectly healthy, just what you’re going to be more sensitive to it if you’ve kicked it out of your diet for a long time, and you’re going to notice things like swelling, if you’re eating processed foods and kind of a lot of processed foods at once, you’re going to get some swelling there. 

So that’s all for today. Hope you found value in this video. If you did give me a thumbs up, if you loved it, give it a heart… That is all, stay strong.”