Excess water retention can lead to bloating around your midsection, a puff your looking face and swollen joints, especially around your extremities like your feet and hands. And with some pretty simple changes, you can get rid of these fluids gathering under your skin and improve your appearance pretty fast. But aside from appearance, there are plenty of other reasons why you might be interested in losing water weight. For example, you might need to cut down and make wait for a certain sport or competition, wrestling and bodybuilding competitions are perfect examples of this. So regardless of whether you just want to lose your bloat or you're prepping for some serious event, this video will outline the exact steps that you should follow to reduce water retention throughout your body. And of course, the very first step for those of you that just want to simply decrease bloat from around your stomach or puffiness from around your face and you want to do it fast is to sweat it out. Your options here include things like sauna, a steam room, a sweat suit and an Epsom salt bath. Even though the process of sweating it out might suck just by spending a couple rounds in a sauna or filling a bathtub with one or two cups of Epsom salt or simply wearing a sweat suit throughout your workout can all reduce puffiness and bloating very fast. If you wake up with a swollen face and you have a date or a wedding to go to these simple methods can create dramatic before and after type of results in a relatively short amount of time. Usually spending just a few 10 to 15 minute rounds in a sauna is all you need for aesthetic purposes. On top of that these methods can of course be used to cut a lot more water wait for sports specific purposes. But make sure you don't go overboard and you know what you're doing because spending too much time in a sauna or losing too much water weight can definitely create problems. Now of course aside from sweating, other things like your diet will have a major impact on water retention, which is why the next thing to make sure that you avoid is any excessive changes to your sodium intake. It's well known that increasing the amount of salt you take in can lead to more fluid retention. This is because sodium binds the h2o and increases the fluid balance both inside and outside your cells. If you also don't currently exercise or you don't regularly drink enough water, increasing your salt intake will lead to an even more drastic rise in water retention because it'll impair your body's ability to naturally excrete the excess sodium. Now it's important to note that based on the current scientific evidence, unlike what you hear, most people say it seems that it's primarily only a sudden increase in salt intake that causes excessive water retention. If you always consume a lot of sodium The effects are less severe or maybe even non existent. This is because your body will adapt to a higher sodium intake by making the kidneys excrete more sodium from the body. Don't get me wrong here. There are plenty of other reasons why it's not beneficial to have too high of a salt intake. But for the purposes of preventing excessive water retention. Make sure you just avoid sudden drastic increases in your salt intake and you should be okay. The next very effective strategy is to manipulate your water intake to trick your body into releasing more The word water. This technique is more so effective if you're trying to hit a certain weight or look a certain way for a one time event. To put it simply, this is done by spending some days drinking significantly more water than what you're currently used to. And then before you win, or do a photo shoot or whatever, you would cut your water intake drastically. This works because drinking a ton of water will make up constantly. This will continue even after you've already cut your water intake because it takes time for your body to adjust. And in that time, if you do it right, you'll be losing a lot of water weight. So to do this right, you'll want to increase your water intake gradually, starting about a week before your event. You want to push your water intake as high as you can by the last day before your event or weigh in. It's not uncommon for people to work their way up to drinking more than two gallons of water on that last day. And then about 12 to 18 hours before the event you want to suddenly cut it off and do your best to sip as little water as possible until after the event or weigh in. Most people follow the wrong advice of tapering water intake down gradually. But tapering will give your body time to adjust urine excretion making the water cut much less effective. Now you're welcome to try this but if it's your first time, I do recommend that you do it under a trainers, coaches or doctor's supervision because if you combine it with other methods that we're going to discuss and you get really dehydrated, you can obviously run into problems. Let's move on to another thing that you'll want to do to lose water weight and that's to increase your potassium intake. While sodium sucks water into cells potassium pumps it out. That's why increasing potassium can help reduce water retention. Meanwhile, having a low potassium intake leads to more water retention. This can be seen in a number of studies. And the big problem with this is that there's other evidence that suggests that many people don't consume enough potassium as it is. Fortunately, it is very possible to fix this by ensuring that you're eating enough potassium rich foods and drinks like coconut water, avocado, salmon, potatoes, bananas and beet greens. Coconut water especially is an excellent source since just one cup supplies you with about 15% of your daily recommended intake. And as an added benefit, it helps hydrate your body which helps your body excrete excess sodium. Speaking of hydration aside from the water manipulation strategy that you can use on the week of your event, you're going to want to stay well hydrated the rest of the time to help reduce water retention. I know it might sound counterintuitive, but drinking more water can actually reduce the amount of water that your body holds on to this is because your body is always trying to achieve a healthy fluid balance. If you're constantly dehydrated, your body tends to retain more water to prevent your fluid levels from dropping too low. Meanwhile, if you drink enough water and you stay hydrated, your body will be less likely to hold on to it. Unfortunately, there is no exact amount of water that's best to opt for, because we all have different physiologies and circumstances. For example, if you do manual labor for work or you work in a hot environment where you're sweating a lot, you'll obviously need more water than someone that's sitting in an air conditioned office all day. However, a decent guideline is to consume enough water so that your urine maintains a light color. If on the other hand, it has a darker yellow color, you're most likely dehydrated and that means you need to drink more water. Another easy way to help reduce waterway is to take a dandelion supplement. The dandelion plant is actually considered a herbal diuretic that safe and effective for reducing water retention. One study found that a dandelion extract increased urine frequency without any apparent side effects. Most of the diuretic effect comes from the leaf of the plant rather than the root. In fact, an animal study found that the dandelion leaf seems to be as effective of a diuretic as a diuretic drug known as furosemide. However, the root of the plant can also be used to make an effective supplement. You can also of course eat dandelion root directly but be warned that it tastes disgusting and it's very dry. So a supplement in this situation is probably the better choice. Also, it's best to take the supplement early in the morning because you don't want to be getting up to pee a dozen times a night. This is especially true since research indicates that not getting enough sleep may affect the nerves in your kidneys, potentially leading to increased water retention. Moving on the next thing that you'll want to do is avoid over consuming refined carbohydrates. In general carbs that aren't used by the body are stored as glycogen and each gram of glycogen comes attached to three grams of water. So it's no secret that reducing carbohydrates will help you rapidly cut water weight. If you're looking to hit a certain weight to weigh in for a competition cutting carbs could really help. However, carbs have many benefits of their own. And if you drastically reduce carbs, your performance with exercise will most likely suffer and you'll probably feel a lot more tired and drained throughout the day. So instead for most people, it's best to focus on the type of carbohydrates you eat, rather than eliminating them altogether. It's well known that refined carbohydrates with a high glycemic index so carbs like sugar and flour. They lead to a rapid spike in blood sugar and insulin and high insulin levels can causes your body to retain more salt by increasing the reabsorption of sodium in the kidneys. This ends up increasing fluid volume inside the body, which means you're going to be holding on to more water. So choose healthy low glycemic carbohydrates like oatmeal, sweet potatoes and especially vegetables rather than the carbohydrates that we all know are in good for us like sweets, pastries and refined grains. Another strategy that can help you lose water weight is to consume caffeine. caffeinated beverages, like coffee and tea have diuretic effects due to the fact that caffeine increases short term urine output, which can lead to a reduction in water retention. And example This can be seen in a study in which groups of people were either given a glass of water with caffeine or one without it. And as a result, your volume increased significantly for the participants that had the caffeine. Now even though caffeine can help you lose some water weight, keep in mind that those benefits only hold true if you haven't already built up a tolerance to caffeine yet. So if you consume caffeine daily, you won't reap the same benefits as someone who just started. That's why if your goal is to reduce your water retention for an event like a photoshoot, you may want to stay away from caffeine a few days or even weeks leading up to the photoshoot and then only have caffeine the day before the shoot and on the day of the shoot itself. Now the next tip you're going to want to do to the best of your ability and that's to stress less. That's right, your body tends to hold on to more water if it's under a chronic state of stress. That's because stress increases vasopressin also known as the anti diuretic hormone, if you have increased levels of that suppressant that'll in turn promote water retention by making your kidneys expel less urine. This is actually the reason why anti inflammatory corticosteroid drugs like prednisone can increase water retention as well. And as a side note, if you are currently taking a corticosteroid and you're also experiencing water retention, you may want to talk to your doctor about a possible alternative solution. But back to the point you can work on reducing stress naturally a couple different ways. The first is by meditating since meditation has been shown to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system and help you tackle your problems more rationally. The second way is by actually trying to deal with a stressor actively by looking for the root cause rather than trying to avoid it. Studies also show that exposing yourself to nature reduces stress as well. And interestingly enough, you can actually even get similar benefits just by adding plants to your home or office. Finally, there are some adaptogens that you can supplement with like ashwagandha and rhodiola to help reduce cortisol and stress. And that actually brings me to our final tip, which is to avoid the common mistake of doing excessive cardio to lose water weight. And guys, the key word here is excessive. It's of course true that you will sweat a lot when doing cardio and doing some cardio is by no means bad. But studies do show that excessive cardio can lead to elevated cortisol levels. This is especially problematic when you consider that there's a lot of evidence that dieting in general can also increase cortisol. Fortunately, short high intensity forms of exercise like Sprint's or resistant training don't have the same adverse effects on cortisol. Now with that said, most of you are most likely not venturing into excessive endurance training territory, and a couple 30 to 45 minute cardio session the week shouldn't have much of a negative effect in terms of water retention, but just be careful that you're not doing way too much just to sweat out some water Wait, that about wraps it up guys, those are the 10 simple methods that you can use to start losing water weight right away. I really hope you enjoyed this video. If you have make sure you subscribe to the channel and hit the bell icon. Also before I sign off, I just want to fully clarify that losing water weight is not the same as losing body fat. If you're trying to drop pounds of body fat and you want a done for you workout plan that can be done at home or in a gym and also comes with a customizable meal plan that's going to be based around your preferences. Whether that be intermittent fasting carb cycling one meal a day keto or vegan to name a few, then click the link below in the description to head on over to my website. But in the gyms we have in New Jersey and the online training, we've literally put thousands of people through these programs and my clients that follow the plan are losing at least 20 pounds, or 5% of their body fat and only six short weeks. To learn more, click the link below or you can visit my website directly at gravity transformation calm. I'll see you guys soon
