The life processes in the body are amazing aren’t they? For example, the water & salt processes via the LCHF/ketogenic way of eating and fasting.
It’s a fact that the body fat may have times of more “wateriness” or “squishiness” before a new level of leanness is revealed. Water retention can be a protective process for the body’s changes. Meanwhile, all this is happening within a context of monthly lunar cycles which give the world’s oceans its high tides and low tides and affect the watery human body as well.
Once I embarked on Intermittent Fasting, the ‘water filtration processes’ sped up significantly, and water retention became less obvious and “swooshes” (water releases from fat cells) seem to happen more efficiently or with greater frequency.
Non-scale victories: All of the above is usually more obvious via measurements than on a weight scale, especially if you’re not obese or if you’re also adding resistance training for increasing muscle mass - in which case we may see very little change on a weight scale, though having a huge recomposition!
Doing some research, I learned that there’s an official thing called “dieter’s edema” and really that there’s a ton of stuff going on at a cellular level in relationship to sodium and inflammation (sometimes that inflammation may be from strength training, the breakdown of muscle cells to build them, etc). As Dr. Phinney has pointed out in recent lectures, though sodium excess is blamed, it is far more likely that sodium deficiency is the real issue. He recommends 2-3 grams a day and even says that up to 5 grams is safer than not enough!
So - water and salt work together in synchrony to help the body cope with recomposition, and this affects many things such as as assimilation & elimination - as pointed out on many threads in this forum.
The realm of “lymphology” is fascinating (Dr. Corwin Samuel West was a pioneer of it in the 1960s in the western world - and eastern sciences of ayurveda and chinese medicine had many, and even more, ways of naming bodily processes and cellular transformation). In western science language, plasma proteins get trapped/held in the interstitial spaces due to inflammation - therefore an anti-inflammation way of eating & fasting such as ketogenic meals and intermittent fasting is as much a lymphatic process as a fat loss process.
Also, I remembered that light-touch large movements/effleurage lymphatic self-massage activates the lymph system and is also reflexively relaxing - easy to do on the belly. Accompanied with deep breathing it’s apparently facilitative. According to the lymphology crowd, it assists the flushing or swooshing of adipose tissue. (Effleurage is totally different than “lymphatic massage” done by a practitioner on the lymph nodes of the body btw).
Water molecules play a HUGE part in attracting proteins and moving fats out. Nurse Cindy’s great short video about this is what got me started researching it a bit more - https://youtu.be/xF3rmi4DJAw
