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Hello and welcome to The Own Your Health podcast, I'm Cyndi Lynne and I can't wait to help you step into your health power. Today we're going to continue our series of Let's Get Started. We got started with Let's Get Started With Supplements and then a two part series on resistance or weight training.
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And I'll put links to those in the show notes if you haven't listened to them already. And today we're going to talk about Let's Get Started with Electrolytes. Now, this series is great for those who are truly just starting out, but there's also a lot of important information for folks who may have been on this health journey for a while and are interested in a little bit of a reset or a little bit of checking in just to confirm that what their practices are align with what their goals are and with the latest information.
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So let's get on to electrolytes. What are electrolytes exactly? And why is it so important for hydration? So electrolytes are essential minerals and these include sodium and potassium, chloride, magnesium.
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Those are the prominent four that you hear the most about. Now these carry an electric charge when they're dissolved in body fluids and they're crucial for hydration because they help regulate the balance of water both inside and outside of your cells.
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So I've said it, you've heard it, you've read it everywhere. You have to drink enough, you have to stay hydrated, you have to, you know, drink water, drink water, drink more water. We've all heard it. But if you don't have the electrolytes in your body, your body is not going to be able to make use of that water and it's not going to be able to hold on to that water.
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And in fact, your body just flushes it out. So if you're one of the folks who, like many of my clients who say, oh my gosh, I spend half my time in the bathroom, when I go to the water, when I drink water, I just have to keep going to the bathroom. It may be because your body is flushing out the water and unable to hold on to it to get actual hydration within the cells.
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So let's look at how it works. First of all, electrolytes are important for fluid balance regulation. Now, electrolytes, particularly sodium and potassium, play a key role in maintaining the proper fluid balance in the cells and then around the cells.
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Sodium typically helps regulate the fluid outside of your cells, while, potassium maintains fluid inside your cells and this balance is essential to prevent cells from being either dehydrated and in fact, they actually shrink or over hydrated and swollen.
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And this is an example of where we can see how something like sodium has become sort of a bad guy, in that when people take too much sodium without having enough potassium, we lose that ability to balance the fluids.
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Now, actual water movement is another key role of electrolytes. Electrolytes influence how water moves around cell membranes through a process called osmosis, and it moves across cell membranes as well. Water tends to move from areas of lower concentration to higher concentration.
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So our body is always working to balance and equalize the, essential minerals in and outside of the cells. So by managing electrolyte levels, the body can control the movement of water and maintain proper hydration in different compartments of the body.
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Also, they're very important in stimulating thirst. Sodium in particular, can stimulate thirst in encouraging you to drink more fluids and then replenish both water and electrolytes if you're taking electrolytes.
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So one of the things I often hear from people is, I'm just not thirsty. I just can't drink all that water. I just feel. I just. I'm too. I'm fine just the way I am. I'm not thirsty. And without the sodium in the body, we aren't triggered to drink more and to bring more fluids in.
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So very often we're dehydrated but don't feel thirsty because of an imbalance in electrolytes. So essentially, electrolytes are vital for regulating the level of fluid in the body and maintaining proper cell function.
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And simply drinking water without replacing lost electrolytes, for example, after sweating, can actually lead the kidneys to flush out the water in an attempt to rebalance the electrolyte concentration, leading to further dehydration.
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Okay, so there's a lot that's going on in that paragraph. So I want to go over that just very thoroughly and deliberately to help you understand. If we don't have enough electrolytes existing in the body and we drink plain water, then our body is not able to hold on to the water, and our kidneys will simply flush it out.
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If we replace hydration water as well as electrolytes by, say, adding an electrolyte supplement to our water and drinking it, then the body has the electrolytes it needs and the fluid, and it can make use of both.
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So for those of you who drink your water faithfully and still are dehydrated, still have dry lips, dry nasal cavities, dry skin, there can be a lot of factors to those things, but one of the main reasons is that our body is unable to hang on to that water.
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We perspire and we lose electrolytes. We lose electrolytes in natural body processes. We burn and use electrolytes. Not just lose, but use electrolytes. Things like magnesium. When our body metabolizes sugar, we use a tremendous amount of magnesium.
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So it's important to replace those electrolytes as well. Now, there's some great products on the market. I'm not, a spokesperson for any of them, but I can put a, link for some of a couple of my favorites.
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They are balanced in that they have all the components, the raw materials, but in fact, the body will actually create the balance it needs because our electrolytes come from our foods as well. It's a little bit trickier to get all of the minerals we need from foods that are traditionally grown because our soils are more deficient in minerals than they used to be.
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And so very often, especially if you exercise, especially if you're in climates that get very warm, replacing electrolytes is important. It's also very easy. And for most people, it makes drinking the water that they need every day much more pleasant because these electrolytes can come with some great, flavors.
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So I encourage you to check out, to start thinking about when you're replacing water, when you're drinking, to start adding some electrolytes to them. A good mineral salt, a good electrolyte mix. As always, I encourage you to experiment and see what works well for you.
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I'm happy to offer suggestions. Like I said, I'll put some of my favorite products that I use every day in the show notes. But electrolyte balance and hydration are really critical to health, and it's a great place for us to get started.
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So until next week, we'll have another Let's Get Started series. Until next week, let's go out and own it.
