Many bodybuilders can get lean and vascular in areas such as legs, arms, chest, but not their abs. This condition is not caused by excess fat that covers the abdominal muscles, but water that your body holds.
A good percentage of the excess weight you are carrying is actually caused by excessive water retention. That’s why one of the steps in your weight loss program should be the elimination of these extra fluids in your body.
By reducing water retention not only you will lose weight, but you will also get that vascular look if you are already fairly lean.
Common Causes of Excessive Water retention
There are a few frequent causes of excessive fluid retention and almost all can be reversed. Let’s look at some of them:
1. Not drinking enough water
The idea of drinking water to lose water might seem counterintuitive, but it actually works. Not getting enough fluids will make you hold excess water.
When you’re dehydrated your body gets into survival mode and stores more water in case you need it later. You eliminate less water trough urination and sweating. So the answer is to drink more water.
By drinking more water, your body “exits” this survival mode and excretes more water out of its system.
2. Not sweating enough
Sweating is a mechanism that serves to cool off your body and regulate the metabolism. If you are working out hard you are already eliminating this cause of water retention.
One important thing to remember though, is to always carry a bottle of drinking water while you work out, so you can replenish lost fluids.
This way you are replenishing the needed fluids while flushing out excessive sodium molecules from your body.
3. You’re consuming too much sodium
That’s right, too much salt will cause you to hold water. Western society is at the top of the list of those who abuse salt. For the sake of making foods tastier and prompting more sales, companies liberally douse foods with sodium.
High sodium intake is a major contributor to obesity as well as various health problems, such as high blood pressure and heart problems.
A healthy person needs about 2.0 grams of sodium a day, while this dose is equal to 1.5 grams for people with high blood pressure, diabetes or kidney problems.
4. Not enough fiber
Besides helping you keep your colon in check, fiber also helps the digestion of protein and excretion of excess water from the body.
The best way to increase fiber intake is to add some non starchy vegetables and fruits to your diet.
5. Medications
Some medications can cause water retention. Since many people take an assortment of under and over the counter medications, it’s worth checking into to see if any of them are attributed with water weight gain.
To overcome this situation, ask your your doctor if the medications you are taking can cause excessive water retention and ask him for a solution to this problem.
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