Health Tip #8 – Reduce Salt Intake

If you eat a high salt diet, your first step should be to cut your salt down to healthy levels. That doesn’t mean eliminate it entirely. Your body does need some salt in order to function properly.

It just means get rid of the excess salt because too much salt can cause serious health problems and serious weight gain.

The main function of salt in your diet is to help your body retain water long enough that it can use it to hydrate itself. If you ate absolutely no salt, the water would just drain right through you without getting delivered to your blood stream and cells.

However, when we eat too much salt (and most of us eat too much salt), we end up retaining way more water than we actually need. The excess water leads to bloating and weight gain in the form of “water weight.” This water weight sticks to your belly area.

By decreasing salt intake, you’ll quickly shed this water weight, which could make a dramatic difference depending on how much salt you normally eat.

The recommended daily intake is 2,300 mg of salt per day. You’re already getting about 1/3 of that if you eat a single fast food cheeseburger. And just because a food doesn’t really taste salty doesn’t mean it is low in salt.

If you get a soda to go along with that cheeseburger, you’re consuming another 19 to 30 mg of salt!

If you eat a lot of processed foods, this is probably where most of your salt is coming from. Studies show that about 90% of Americans eat too much salt. And by “too much” I really mean too much.

As mentioned above, the recommended intake is 2,300 mg per day. But the average American eats about 3,500 per day. That’s nearly double the amount recommended every single day.

But only about 10% of that salt is actually coming from the salt you sprinkle on yourself. The other 90% is hidden in foods (especially foods you don’t really expect to be high in salt).

When you buy foods that are ready made or processed (junk food, convenience food, etc.), you’re buying a whole lot of extra, unnecessary salt.

So check the labels on the food you buy and start eating more whole foods that don’t need to have ingredient labels because they have no added ingredients.

Fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairy products are all naturally low in salt and naturally high in flavor.

If you switch to a diet of whole, unprocessed foods, you won’t even need to watch your salt intake so closely because you can be confident in knowing that the only salt in your diet is the salt you added.

And as you read earlier, the salt you actually add yourself only accounts for about 10% of the total amount.

If you are like 90% of Americans, then you only add about 350 mg of salt on your own. If you switch to a natural, no salt added, whole food diet, you could add six times the amount you currently do and still fall below the recommended 2,300 mg allowance.

All that is to say that reducing salt intake isn’t even a challenge. It’s just a matter of eating the right foods so that you aren’t consuming so much hidden salt. Once you do that, you’ll watch the pounds melt off without even needing to stress about salt.