Lose weight /High blood pressure Need Low Sodium suggestions

Frozen food will be super hard to eat on low sodium. Most everything I eat is not frozen because of the sodium. Same goes for the canned foods. If you are on the app you can look at your sodium on the nutrition tab. I am on a low sodium diet but, mine is 2000Mgs. You just learn to spice your food with things other than salt, garlic salt or onion salt. I have found paprika, chili powder,garlic powder and onion powder is my favorite spice mix for a wide variety of things. You can get Mrs.dash which are no or low sodium spice mixes but, I didn't like any that I tried. So I just have a wide variety of spices. You will learn overtime how to make recipes lower sodium. Less broth, more veggies.

Good luck. I failed to do what you are doing. Foolishly went on meds for over twenty years. I needed to do something, but the meds were a real PIA. Ran out at the worst times, felt horrible. Actually hospitalized twice because of them. So I'm med free after losing weight and changing my diet. I hope you can.

As someone said frozen foods are mostly loaded with sodium, there are exceptions like some vegetables. Many canned and processed foods are very high too. There are low or no added sodium(many foods naturally contain it) of many canned vegetables. If you look you should find low sodium soups, be careful they may still contain a lot so read the label expecially the number of servings. I can't emphasize the importance of reading labels till you learn what to be careful about.

Restaurant food and fast food are difficult or impossible. Again nutrition numbers are your friends. Any McDonald's I've eaten has been 800 mg.+ for a single sandwich. Some are much higher.

So what to eat? I mostly cook from scratch, even then there's foods to watch out for, for example processed pork(ham bacon) is loaded with sodium while pork contains little. Obviously that's the easiest solution, not possible for everyone. You can find alternative foods that are lower sodium if you are diligent.

Logging what you eat is a great exercise as you can backtrack to what meals cause it and then into the data for the foods that contain it. All with MFP. To see your running daily totals go to Nutrition then to Nutrients and you can see the sodium, click it and MFP shows the meals that contributed to the total. Then go to Dairy and review the highest sodium meal foods. Using that technique and searching for lower sodium options is how I got mine down.

You can set sodium as one if your macros. I believe light salt is half sodium and half potassium. You can make fresh peanut butter at many health food stores with no added salt. I actually prefer it to commercial which is too salty for my taste, but it is definitely an acquired taste. Really read nutritional labels of processed foods, beverages too.

I'm also watching my sodium and try to keep it below 1200. It started with having to cook low-sodium meals for my parents, and the congenital concerns have apparently been passed along to me.

Agreed that from-scratch cooking is the best way to go, and you can actually have some fun flavoring things up. Like others here, I like a mix of spices, and I also like to cook with wine. Not long ago, because I had no wine in the house, I used some of an old bottle of spiced rum, and aside from a startling moment of unplanned flambe, the result was lovely. Now if I use the rum for cooking, I just take the pan off the heat first and the alcohol cook out off the flame before putting it back. A quarter cup of wine or other alcoholic beverage, used to de-glaze a pan and tossed with onions makes a very nice, quickie sauce.

Other acids are great too: lemon, lime, vinegar of various types.

Fresh garlic cloves, smashed and chopped fine, then thrown into a hot pan with a bit of olive oil. Low flame - don't burn the garlic!

Toasted mustard seeds, also very nice, if you like your food to bite you back a little.

Bread has a lot of sodium, too. Having promised my doctor to have oatmeal every day, I make a quick grind of dry oats into a flour and whip up variety of tortillas, pancakes, and this weekend I had fun practicing oat flour crepes. Takes very little time, and I know exactly how much salt (and other things) have gone into it.

Look at doing DASH. The book is called DASH Diet Weight Loss Solution by Margo Heller. It was designed for people with high blood pressure but is now and has been for past 3 years number 1 diet beating out Weght Watchers. There is also a Facebook page called New DASH Diet group for those following the plan. It works!

Excellent advices above.
Food in cans and processed foods are likely high salt.
Factories often introduce salt into meats to increase their water content so that they weigh more.

I am a mostly vegan. If I didn't have a soy sauce addiction my sodium intake is around 200 mg a day. As it is, I meander between 1000 - 1500 mg a day.

When you shift to a low carbohydrate or a ketogenic diet, your body loses storage carbohydrate, and also begins excreting sodium and water. When this happens, your blood pressure quickly drops, and much of the low energy that is attributed to “low blood sugar” when eating low carbohydrates is actually due to this low blood pressure.

Read more http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/2012/08/low-carb-diet-supplements/

veggiecanner wrote: »

Anything with my normal amount of salt tastes too salty to me now. I've been on the low salt salt diet for 4 monthes now.

^This.

About 6 weeks ago I was diagnosed with high blood pressure. My Dr. wanted me to try a low sodium (1500 mg) before starting any meds. All my life I always had very low BP. I stayed within the range he told me and it still didn't drop. Just started meds.