Why Cutting Salt Makes You Look Worse

Members ask me about sodium all the time. Should they track it in the offseason? How much salt is too much when they're trying to lose a pound a week? Why do they weigh more the morning after a low-carb day, when they ate less than any other day of the week? Is the water they're holding from salt, from carbs or from their gear?

Most of those questions come from the same belief: that salt is something you cut when you diet. I think that's backwards. On my diets, sodium stays high, and it stays steady. The problem is almost never too much salt. It's too little, or sodium that jumps around from day to day.

Cutting sodium on a diet is the worst thing you can do

This is the part most people get wrong, so I'll say it plainly.

You hear sodium, and people always think you need to go low sodium on a diet. That's the worst thing you can do. A hydrated muscle is less likely to be broken down, and a hydrated body is more efficient at oxidative phosphorylation, which is the process of burning fat. So a dehydrated body is poor at burning fat. When you don't eat enough sodium, you get dehydrated, you don't hold water in your body, and you actually get worse at burning fat.