How Salt Turns Your Scale Into a Funhouse Mirror

A lot of diet plans will instruct you to avoid salt. It's not great for your heart and blood pressure, but I suspect that they also tell you this because it'll create some weird distortions in your weight and they want you to stick with their plan.

Here at Cheapo, we take a different approach. Feel free to use salt if it's replacing a topping high in calories and/or sugar, but otherwise, don't go crazy with it every day or you'll get some wild weight swings, even if you're hitting your calorie targets. Water weighs a lot - 8 pounds per gallon, and the more sodium you intake the more water you'll retain.

Ultimately, calories are what count and weekly weight averages are your performance metric, but the statistical noise created by sodium can be a bummer if it catches you off guard. The water you retain from a high sodium day will flush out in the next day or two, provided you also normalize your salt intake.

Also, be advised that restaurants use a lot of salt, so even if you think you're moderating yourself with your menu choices, you're going to see some level of spike on the scale the next day. It's just going to happen, so be prepared for it so that you don't get frustrated.

Lastly, I really recommend my skinny iced coffee as your daily driver drink of choice. Coffee is a diuretic, so it'll cause you to flush a lot of the excess sodium out of your system while it hydrates you with all that melted ice. The caffeine will also make you a little more wired and inclined to move around a lot. Just try to break the habit of using sugar - zero calorie sugar substitutes are ok, but you can use preferably skim milk or alternatively coffee creamer.

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