Advice You Didn’t Ask For - Don’t Forget Your Micronutrients

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allother94
allother94 Posts: 588 Member
edited December 2019 in Food and Nutrition
I’ve been tracking my food, eating at my macros, and ignoring my micros for about a year and a half. I’ve been getting headaches and tingling throughout this time and recently found out my blood platelets were low.

A couple of days ago I started looking at the MyFitnessPal reports and noticed my daily iron and potassium intake was MUCH lower than the recommendation. Doing some research, I found that my symptoms were consistent with an iron and/or potassium deficiency.

So I added some iron forfeited cereal, lentils, and bananas to my diet over the past few days and I’m feeling better already.

The moral of the story is to make sure to monitor your micros as much as your macros. Your micros may not affect your gains and losses much, but they can have a huge impact on your overall health and well-being.

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  • allother94
    allother94 Posts: 588 Member
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    Can I get an amen?
  • RuthDK
    RuthDK Posts: 6 Member
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    Yup
  • feisty_bucket
    feisty_bucket Posts: 1,047 Member
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    Amen. Good job, kudos, thumbs up, etc. ;)

    Just wanted to add: for supplementing potassium, the best way I know of is with salt substitutes. There's "NuSalt" and a few others, but they're usually all potassium.

    Because some people with heart conditions have problems with potassium directly, the potassium supplements you can buy in capsules are pretty useless. It's weird, but you can find the details online.

  • nicsflyingcircus
    nicsflyingcircus Posts: 2,426 Member
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    feisty_bucket wrote: »
    Amen. Good job, kudos, thumbs up, etc. ;)

    Just wanted to add: for supplementing potassium, the best way I know of is with salt substitutes. There's "NuSalt" and a few others, but they're usually all potassium.

    Because some people with heart conditions have problems with potassium directly, the potassium supplements you can buy in capsules are pretty useless. It's weird, but you can find the details online.

    I use Morton's lite salt a good bit. It's 50/50 sodium and potassium.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
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    NovusDies wrote: »
    MFP is not an ideal site for managing micros because some people do not bother to put all the nutrition information from the label into the foods they enter so the database is unreliable.

    I don't worry about them myself because I eat a pretty good variety of food and my blood is tested about every 4 months. When I am in a large whoosh I know to supplement electrolytes.

    Yeah--I have out of curiosity checked micros at other sites from time to time, and generally found that so long as I am eating a good healthy and varied diet with lots of veg and some fruit I'm good (including on potassium). I kind of assume people know that eating a healthy (nutritious) diet is important for health, and I think it's not that hard to do that without specifically tracking everything, but I suppose it's not a bad thing to say it.

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