My advice is to ditch the canned foods altogether. Even the "low sodium" ones have too much salt. Fresh fruits and vegetables are your best bet. Barring that, you can use frozen ones, but stay away from the pre-packed stir-fry medleys with sauces. They are a sodium mega-bomb.

Good luck!

I understand what high blood pressure does, and that sodium can cause high blood pressure. what i was saying is that if someone doesnt have high blood pressure and why would they actively count and be concerned with their sodium intake. mostly what i see on these weight loss communities is 'omg i cant eat salt before my weigh in.' or people taking water pills before their weigh in...which is what i was referring to, it doesnt make sense to me to be concerned with water weight. just like why would you cry over some extra weight during TOM. i feel like your response was condescending and i dont appreciate it.

Boarhead low salt turkey is awesome at publix

I try to avoid it, but it IS hard to, and it is the price we pay for convenience. Deli meat is a biggie for me, as well as the frozen dinners. I do try to keep it under 2500 mg though.

Maybe it's just diet root beer, then. I have checked the labels on my Diet Pepsi, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, and diet ginger ale and have never seen such a high amount of sodium. Just further reinforces that we have to check the labels on everything!

watchhershrink, from your initial post, it didn't sound like you knew what damage sodium could cause other than water retention, so SAPF was just explaining--all she did was state a fact (well, 2--that it can cause high blood pressure and that high blood pressure can cause other issues). I'm 110% positive it was not meant to be condescending, and I'm not even sure how it could be worded much differently. Message boards are tough in that you can't hear tone of voice, just read flat words and interpret them how you assume they meant to be expressed, but it was just a statement, so please don't get offended :^:
To try to answer your question, though, I certainly understand where some people are coming from who weigh in in groups (WW, TOPS, etc.). Whether your increase in weight is because you ate poorly or because it's water weight, it's hard to face a group of others when you've gained--you feel like a bit of a failure. This is not true for all, of course--some can just brush it off as water weight and be done with it--but in such an environment where you have to share with others whether you gained or lost for the week, having even a gain for ANY reason can be a major downer. I used to attend weekly TOPS meetings, and there would sometimes be people who gained multiple weeks in a row and ALWAYS said it was water weight--after a while, it's an easy excuse to fall back on, so maybe some people would rather use the water pills or reduce their sodium intake to reduce the number of "excuses" they might have for a gain to try to get a truer representation of their progress, ya know? I hope that all makes sense :dizzy: In short, it's the same old thing--we're all different, and some of us need to do different things to limit the number of head games that come with the challenge of weight loss.

Salt was the first thing I gave up and what started my whole journey. I never had problems with swelling until one day I realized that my ankles an lower legs kept retaining fluid and it wasn't going away. That scared me.

I've had no problems without it for the last 10 months.

A few notes I wanted to make...

On Fitday, watch what they list in "recipes" I noticed that they assume we all add extra salt to cook with (by default), even plain cooked veggies. When I first started tracking I was like "what the heck???' where's all that sodium coming from? Once I realized what was happening and changed the figures my sodium was well controlled. My numbers started like yours and now are usually around 1000mg.

Also if you don't want to give up salt competely, just don't use it in a recipe while cooking. It is much harder for our tongues to recognize the salt that way. (per my nutrition/health professor) add it after cooking when it's on your plate. You will notice the flavor more with using much less. It needs to be on the surface.

This may seem a bit extreme but in my effort to ferret out all sources of sodium I found that softened water is also a culprit. DUH...It never occured to me that the water is softened with SALT. Of course some of it is in the water. (noticed this in a few books) It actually made sense to me logically since my water source at work is softened and my home is not, I started bringing water from home and did notice a difference after a while.

Ditto everything on the processed foods, get rid of them if you want to get rid of the sodium.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot...one of my God sends is ONION POWDER. It gives a lot of flavor without the salt.