Okay, lately I’ve been eating a lot of salty foods, and I’m currently nearing that time of the month. Meaning, I’m retaining a lot of fluids. Unlike some people, I don’t bloat and get a thicker waistline-instead, this all goes into my head-especially my ears. I have a terrible amount of fluid in my ears, which makes me dizzy and headachy.
Now, yesterday, my dad brought home Chinese takeout (YUM!) and now my head is swimming.
Is there any quick method of getting the excess salt out of my system? Like drinking a lot of water or something?
“Water pills,” a.k.a. diuretics, are available over the counter at the pharmacy. Coffee is also a diuretic. I can’t think of the other foods that are; a nutrition website would tell you.
I have heard that if you drink a lot of water, it will flush the salt out…
FYI, I’ve also heard about some diet where you drink a gallon of water a day to lose weight…
Sweat and urine are the only ways the body excretes salt. For either method you need a good supply of water, so I’d say water should help. (Not sports drinks, obviously!) But ultimately, reducing salt intake is more effective than trying to get your body to get rid of salt - or so everyone tells me.
Yes, increasing your water intake will help flush excess salt out–but be careful, Guin. You can overdo it and flush too much sodium (and potassium) out, which means, worst-case scenario, that you go into cardiac arrest or something. Your body needs a certain amount of sodium (and potassium) to function normally.
I recall drinking a gallon of water an hour if I could get it in Viet-Nam and we never had a low-sodium casualty. Of course, we took salt tablets because we understood that we would die if we didn’t. From my reading of the ABC news report it seems clear that none of these recruits were taking salt tablets. I have serious doubts that an average person in a non-stress situation could drink enough water fast enough to die from it.
I drink a LOT of water. In fact, water is the ONLY thing I drink, and I feel
In the functional condition called polydipsia, people do drink enough water to throw off their electrolytes. Whether they’re “average” is debatable. Some are demented, or schizophrenic. Others have eating disorders or are using a too-much-of-a-good-thing diet strategy. For others, etiology is unknown.
I am sorry if my statement was not clear to you. I meant to say an average person in a non-stress situation. If polydipsia was the normal human condition, it would not be named polydipsia. It would be called ‘average’. Do you want to debate whether people with diagnosed abnormalities, diseases, afflictions dementia or schizophrenia are ‘average’?
Honestly toots, you are never getting on a plane in MY airport.
Actually, that’s more due to the manner in which MDMA disrupts the body’s normal water elimination process - not from people drinking too much water. The over-hydration deaths aren’t nearly as common as the ones from people being sold other, more dangerous drugs, under the guise of them being MDMA.
