Sodium intake

cindybrooksy

Hi, I've started on mfp 5 weeks ago as part of a 8 week fitness challenge I'm part of. Realistically, I think I have 20 pounds to lose to get to 155 from currently, 171. The numbers on the scale don't mean too much I've learned, but I reference them because at one time in my life I was at what I thought was a healthy weight at 155 lbs. But within the last 4-5 weeks I have been very active in comparison to any other time in my life, doing about 30 minutes of a sweat induced workout on my elliptical trainer with interval training 5-7 days out of the week, and I've noticed I can't rely on the scale completely alone since at 4 weeks into my elliptical training I measured my calves and lost about an inch in each leg, while only losing 5 lbs on my initial first week, with the weeks following either maintaining or gaining/losing 1 -2 lbs.
I had a question if anyone knows the answer that would be great. I saw a short clip of Jillian Micheals saying to lose the last 20 pounds of fat, you have to rev up your metabolism, and you can do this by reducing your sodium intake. Has anyone found this to be true? Some sites I have found say that all it will do is act as a dieretic and you will lose water weight, so while that part is true, I am wondering if it gives a "changing things up-shock" to your metabolism for the better? I've reduced my sodium the last 2 days and I have lost water weight, what seems to be 2 lbs. from my scale.
Thanks all.


Nevermind. I just found an interesting article indicating that sodium is not as bad as Americans believe. Very interesting. One example was they did studies thinking that the high salt content in traditional Japanese cuisine (soy sauce, fish, freeze dried vegetables) was causing the high numbers of stomach cancer in Japan. They did a sample study with 3000 subjects I believe, feeding them all three foods. Then they did a second group of subjects feeding them eliminating the fish and freeeze dried vegetables, only giving them soy sauce in addition to their diet. Turns out the soy sauce was not the carcinogen. It was the freeze dried vegies they believe.
Also went into why pregnant women need salt for their babies because in a different time, doctors would reccomend low salt diets and their babies suffered for it. Seems salt helps us all carry blood to other parts of our body and is actually good for thermogenics in our body. I am no longer continiuing my low salt experiment.
If you want to read more the article is:
http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/salt.shtml

Also another paragragh from the article on fat loss:

The thermogenic effects of sodium can be seen in long-term studies, as well as short. A low-sodium diet accelerates the decrease in heat production that normally occurs with aging, lowering the metabolic rate of brown fat and body temperature, and increasing the fat content of the body, as well as the activity of the fat synthesizing enzyme (Xavier, et al., 2003).