Losing Weight: Can Salt Make You Overweight

Please note that this is my article. I allowed one site to put it up on their site but it is no longer there. With a search, I saw that a few sites copied it without my permission, violating copyright law. It does not mention the author. I am improving this article now on losing weight with more recent information on potassium. This enhanced article is being put up on July 14, 2011.

It is important to consume as little salt as possible, not just for cardiovascular health, but to reduce or lose excess weight. This is the missing piece that many are overlooking making it harder for them to lose weight. An MD and a registered dietitian (R.D.) wrote the book, The Rice Diet Solution: The World Famous Low-Sodium, Good Carb, Detox Diet . They say that eating salt causes you to eat a lot more food!

Salt is not a food and so it has no calories. So it will not create fat. But there are other things that can make you overweight. If the problem is fat, then all you have to do is burn more calories than you consume making losing weight simple.

If one has a 30 pound tumor then it will not matter how little they consume and how much they exercise, they will still be overweight. They will need surgery to get the tumor removed. This is one example of something other than fat that can make you overweight and make losing weight harder.

Salt and Sodium

Here is an explanation of concentration in the body. Say you have a pool that has salt water in it and you need to keep the concentration at a teaspoon of salt per gallon of water. You have a tool to measure salt concentration. If someone adds a gallon of water to it, then when you measure the concentration, you will find that you need to add a teaspoon of salt to it.

If someone adds a teaspoon of salt to it, then you will find that you need to add a gallon of water to it to maintain the right concentration. Your body needs to always maintain a proper concentration of sodium (and other minerals) or you will cease to exist (die).

All foods contain very tiny amounts of minerals like under 1%. But salt is not a food and it contains 40% sodium. Salt is a rock. So the more salt or sodium you consume, the more water needs to be in the body to keep the concentration constant. The body tries to get rid of salt but it can only do it at a certain rate. This is why sweat and urine are salty. This is not the case with people who do not consume salt.

Natural, unprocessed foods (no salt added) contain all the sodium that you need. A teaspoon of salt contains more sodium than you would find in over 100 pounds of unprocessed, natural foods! Most salt in the diet comes from processed foods, not from the salt shaker. This sodium causes excess water in your body that also leads to high blood pressure or hypertension. For the full story and way to eliminate this, see the Main Cause of High Blood Pressure.

Salt also causes bone loss and osteoporosis. New Zealanders researchers put elderly women on a low salt diet and then switched to a high salt diet. They ate the same amount of calcium on both diets. On the high salt diet, they lost 30% more calcium than on the loww salt diet. For the full story on this, see Real Cause of Osteoporosis. Do you smoke? Webmd.com has an article saying that cutting salt is as good for heart health as quitting smoking.

Excess Weight

So consuming salt causes your body to hold on to extra amounts of water (water weight) causing you excess weight. This is also called water retention or retaining water. This makes you heavy and look fat. But no matter how little you eat and how much you exercise, it will have no affect on this extra weight. So if your problem is excess fat, then eat less and exercise more.

But if that does not help, then it may be too much water weight that you need to lose. For example Beyonce lost 20 pounds in 10 days on the Lemonade Diet. Now if that was 20 pounds of fat then she would have needed to burn 70,000 (20 x 3,5000) more calories than she consumed in 10 days. That is burning 7,000 more calories than she consumed each day to lose weight.

She would have needed to exercise all day long to do that. But the lemonade diet has no salt in it. So it is easy for her body to lose most of that 20 pounds by losing water weight. Now if you look at labels you will see that lots of foods, including diet foods, have very large amounts of sodium in them due to added salt.

New Addition (added 12/18/2011)

On this video, a woman talks about the benefits of a raw diet. Some people on a raw food diet eat salt, even though salt is not a food. At about 3 minutes she shows a picture of what she used to look like and she mentions how salt made her look puffy. She looked much heavier and looked horrible compared to what she looks like now. See her video here! Also raw foods do not need salt. When you cook a food, you take away a lot of its taste and then add salt. She looks so good now that on one video she dances in a bikini to show off how great she looks from a raw diet. This woman consumes no salt and 97% of her diet is fruit. Also this woman eats huge amounts of food-- more than any other woman!

Very Latest Addition (added 3/6/2012)

Everyone on the all raw diet with no salt lose weight if they are overweight. I saw on a forum that one lady had been on it for 3 months and had not lost any weight. She was still 200 pounds. But she added that she uses tamari since she loves it. Tamari is soy sauce without wheat and has a huge amount of salt in it. So the salt alone was able to completely stop her from losing weight.

Losing Weight

There is a problem in plans on losing weight. People lose the weight then reach a plateau where they cannot lose any more weight. That may be because it is not fat but water weight. And exercise and eating less calories has no effect on water weight (water retention).

Any person that is overweight could probably quickly lose 20 pounds of weight by reducing salt intake. One lady wrote to me (my name is Chuck Bluestein) and said that she had tried everything to lose weight but nothing worked. She was frustrated. Then she learned the above about losing water weight and quickly lost the weight.

Also salt is bad for cardiovascular health even if you do not have high blood pressure, yet. Skeletons over 10,000 years old contain no salt. So that is probably when man started consuming salt on a large scale. Salt is one of many salts known and is also known as common table salt. People need sodium, but not salt. People need potassium, but do not need the salt, potassium chloride, which is now being added to foods like popcorn and soup.

Consuming more potassium helps your body to get rid of sodium easier and faster. The cells have a sodium-potassium pump that needs a lot more potassium than sodium in the blood for it to work right. Many newspapers (July 2011) tell about a federal study showing that low potassium consumption makes a high salt diet much, much worse. So also consume more potassium in foods to help with cardiovascular health and losing weight. A high potassium to sodium ratio is more important than just a low sodium diet.

You can drink an 8 fl oz glass of orange juice before meals since it contains over 500 mg of potassium. Raisins are a snack very high in potassium. You can eat an avocado before a meal since it contains 2,400 mg of potassium. A banana has 400 mg of potassium. A large potato has 800 mg of potassium, There is a danger in consuming too much potassium in supplements, but not in foods.

Instead of adding salt to foods, you can add granulated kelp (seaweed) to foods (found in health food stores). It has plenty of iodine and is loaded with trace minerals that you need and will also help metabolism. The land that food is grown on is lacking in trace minerals. Kelp also helps the body to get rid of excess radiation. Also use other spices, like turmeric. Spices are foods and great for health.

Sea Salt

Watch video below with Joel Fuhrman M.D. talking about "healthy salts" like sea salt. He wrote the book below about losing weight. He created the nutritarian diet. He created the ANDI (aggregate nutrient density index) scale that is used by Whole Foods markets. It rates kale at 1,000 the highest on the scale. Have you heard that kale is the new beef?

Foods have less than 1% sodium. Salt it a rock and is 40% sodium. Some think that since sea salt is natural it is OK to eat. Rocks and crystals like diamonds are natural but that does not mean that they are OK to eat. Biology teaches that plants create foods out of non-foods like minerals, air, sunlight and water. Animals consume foods. This is why urine and feces is good for plants but not for animals.

Since sea salts are 98% sodium chloride, they are 39% sodium. There is one salt, Celtic sea salt and that is 84% sodium chloride and the rest other minerals. So that is 33.6% sodium. That is still way too much. The people that are saying good things about sea salt, are trying to sell you a certain brand of it. They do not care about your health. They want your money.

There is a man-made salt called PANSALT. Studies in Finland show that it is much healthier than salt-- a lot less strokes. It is only around 50% salt (sodium chloride) and it has a lot of potassium chloride and some other minerals. So if you must use salt, then use that. Now you are talking of around 20% sodium but it has a lot of potassium to help with the sodium to potassium ratio.

Make sure to see my other article about the Cause of High Blood Pressure and its connection to salt. It also has a link to the webmd.com article saying that cutting salt is as good for heart health as quitting smoking. That means that quitting salt is better for heart health than quitting smoking according to webmd.com!