What if it's not too much fat that you are carrying around? What if it's excess water weight?

What is it's not too much fat that you are carrying around? What if it's excess water weight? - That's right. - Have you considered that it could be fluid retention that is your problem? If it's fluid retention it is a simple matter to reduce it. You need to eat less salt and salty food.

Your excess weight is likely to be water weight/fluid retention if you are one of the people who are vulnerable to salt, also known as sensitive to salt. The vulnerable groups include people who take or have taken certain prescribed steroids, including prednisone and prednisolone, or certain other prescribed drugs, women who take or have taken HRT or other oestrogen-containing drugs such as some contraceptive medications, people who take or have taken amitriptyline or other tricyclic antidepressants, or SSRIs like Prozac, people who take or have taken some other psychotropic/psychoactive drugs, pregnant mothers, PMT sufferers and people who ate salt as children.

If you fall into one of the vulnerable groups I have listed or if you ate a high salt diet as a child you will be sensitive to salt. People without this problem can eat salty foods without doing a lot of harm to themselves, because their kidneys will excrete the sodium which is excess to their requirements. But for people sensitive to salt, some of the excess sodium, along with the water it attracts, will enter their blood stream and not be excreted. So they carry extra weight - as water - around with them all the time. They also lose more heat from their bodies because the surface area of their body has increased with the added water, and the rate at which a body loses heat is proportional to its surface area. - They therefore need extra calories to do the extra work and to provide the extra heat. - So their appetite increases in order to obtain these extra calories. - So they may very well eat more to satisfy their genuine need for calories. - If what they eat is salty, then the cycle will repeat itself and they are likely to become obese.

To break the cycle and put the process into reverse, all that is necessary for them to do is to eat less salt. And eating extra potassium by way of fresh fruit and vegetables will accelerate the excretion of the sodium and water and speed up the weight loss. If you want to lose weight, eat less salt!