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Introduction: How to reduce swelling in legs, ankles, and feet
Let's talk about how to get rid of swollen legs, ankles, and feet. Would you believe that I used to have pitting edema right on my ankles? I would remember pressing into my lower ankle and leaving a dent. I mean, I'm not that old; it was some years ago. But even in this picture you could see my face was completely round. Anytime someone has a round face, what that means is they have blood sugar issues. The point is, I had a lot of health problems, and pitting edema was definitely one of them.
What is edema?
Now, swollen legs are called edema. If you look this up, it'll say that it's a liver problem, a kidney problem, a heart problem, or that maybe you're consuming too much sodium. But that's not always the case. There's something else, way more common, and I'm going to share that with you today. This is totally easy to fix. When you watch this video, if you just apply what I'm going to show you, you will fix this very fast without taking a blood thinner or some type of diuretic to push the fluid out. I mean, those come with side effects, especially when you have fluid retention in your lower legs and ankles.
Edema explained
This boils down to a problem with tiny pumps that are not working in your cells. You have millions and millions of these tiny pumps that push fluid in and out of the cell, and the specific pump that's not working in this case is called the sodium potassium pump. There are some really interesting things about this pump. It uses about 30 to 40% of all the energy that is given to that cell. But if that pump goes bad, like the pump in our basement when it went bad and we had about a foot of water in our basement, then in your body you're going to have a lot of fluid that is not inside the cells. It's going to be outside the cells, and that's called interstitial fluid retention.
So what's really going on in your lower ankles is a condition where the sugar in your blood is too high, and all that sugar is connected to the protein in the blood called hemoglobin. Let's say we have a protein bar right here representing the protein, and a marshmallow representing the sugar. What happens when this sugar connects to the protein in your blood? This is called glycation. This is a term you hear with the test called A1C. The A1C test measures how much sugar is stuck to your blood protein, and it gives you an average over about 3 months, because the red blood cell survives about 3 months. When this sugar gets stuck to the blood protein, it doesn't come off. It's stuck there permanently until that blood cell dies. So when you eat more sugar, you get more sugar stuck to this protein, until the protein can't work anymore. The name for this is that the protein is glycated.
The main takeaway is that when you eat sugar, you destroy the ability of the blood cell to carry nutrition and oxygen to the body. This glycated protein molecule now plugs up your circulation. Then you get a lack of blood flow, and then pooling in the lower part of your body, and that's the swelling. It also destroys the inside of your arteries and creates a leakiness outside the cell, so fluid that was supposed to be inside your vessels can now escape.
High blood sugar and fluid retention
The other thing this does when you eat a lot of sugar is that it actually creates sodium retention. Not to mention, the other mineral, potassium, gets locked up in the sugar, and wherever the sodium goes, the water goes. Over time this affects the nerves in the bottom of the feet, and you get numbness and tingling, which is called peripheral neuropathy. So yes, when you look at a diabetic, you see a lot of fluid in the ankles, but even people who are not diabetic, and maybe not even pre-diabetic but heading in that direction, can have fluid retention. That's what I had.
How to get rid of edema
There is a very important vitamin to correct this, but there are also two minerals you need to get from the diet. The obvious one is potassium. The problem with potassium is that it's not easy to get from the diet, because we need so much. An average person needs 4,700 milligrams. Think about what that means: one banana is about 300 milligrams. How many times does 300 go into 4,700? You would have to consume 15.6 bananas every day just to get your potassium, and that's going to be hard, and it's also a lot of sugar. So instead, you might be better off eating avocados, more salad, and more fruit like berries. You can get a lot of potassium from those.
The other mineral is magnesium, which is behind something called ATP, the energy currency of the body. Yes, you're going to get cramps if you have magnesium problems, but you'll also have a lack of energy. To get magnesium, you probably need to consume more pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds, as well as leafy greens. You don't need 4,700 milligrams like potassium; you need about 420 milligrams of magnesium. You can also get both of these from a good electrolyte powder, but make sure it's high quality and doesn't have hidden sugars.
Vitamin B1 and edema
That will fix the pump, but the reason the pump went bad is what we want to talk about next: a deficiency of vitamin B1. In this simple chart, which is actually a huge biochemical chart, you can see all the chemistry going on. When you eat sugar, it starts here and has to be broken down into a smaller sugar molecule called glucose, and then it has to enter the machine to be turned into energy. To go from this step to this step, one little enzyme requires vitamin B1. If you don't have enough, you will not be able to use that sugar as energy. The number one cause of a B1 deficiency is consuming too many refined carbohydrates. If you eat all this refined sugar without enough B1, the body has to pull from its reserves, from different tissues, organs, and glands, and eventually that runs out.
B1 is also very important as an antioxidant that protects the nerves. This is why, when you run out of B1, you get peripheral neuropathy, which is tingling, numbness, and burning on the bottom of your feet. B1 is so important in carbohydrate metabolism and in protecting you against a lot of carbohydrates. When I say protection, I'm talking about protection against glycation, the sugar connecting to the protein. B1 keeps these apart so you don't destroy your blood cells and you keep good circulation, because as soon as that connection forms, it's permanent and won't come off.
So magnesium, potassium, and B1 are the solution to swollen ankles, but you also have to get the sugar out of the diet. As soon as you go back to eating refined carbohydrates, the swelling comes back. Now the question is, if I'm not going to eat carbs, what am I going to eat? For that information, you need to watch this video right here.