How Magnesium Consumption May Aid In Reducing Belly Girth.

Sometimes it could just be about the elimination of excess accumulated gas in the gut.

I remember those days when I started working on my weight loss regime in a quest to look slimmer and healthier.

One of the things that I did do was to increase my intake of magnesium.

There are a lot of things that magnesium does as a nutrient.

One of the major things that magnesium does is to relax a person’s muscles. We do know of using Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) as a laxative. Taking an Epsom salt bath may also help to promote one’s state of relaxation.

In contrast, calcium acts as a signal for muscles to contract. The muscle cells take in calcium ions from the surrounding, which signal them to contract. Magnesium helps to relax muscles by promoting the release of calcium from the cell, so we’re looking at a tandem action of magnesium and calcium.

One contracts, the other relaxes.

And that’s because of how we want our own bodies to function. We need the muscles to contract so that we can actually use them to lift weights and move them around, for instance. However, when we’re done with all that work, would we want to keep them in a contracted state or do we want them to go back into a relaxed state?

The idea, therefore, is that we want our muscles to contract and relax according to the situation at hand - it’s all about optimising our body’s ability to do things properly.

If our muscles can’t relax and remain in a semi-permanent state of contraction, guess what — cramps may occur more frequently, and that is also why magnesium supplements are recommended for reducing cramps.

Interestingly, though, it is this tandem contract-relax action that the calcium-magnesium duo has on muscles where magnesium can also be used for supporting heart health.

In fact, we could argue that magnesium is also necessary for supporting gut health because our gastrointestinal tract makes use of peristaltic motions (a contracting-relaxing action) to move food from our stomach through the gut and out into the toilet bowl.

And that was what I realised when I increased my dietary magnesium intake.

My muscles were cramping less frequently, but I also realise that I was becoming more farty as my intestines started eliminating excess accumulated gas in there,

And of course, as I started to eliminate more accumulated intestinal gas through my rear end, my belly girth started going down. Not as significantly as from the losing of actual fat mass, but the feeling of bloatedness was significantly reduced in my opinion.

Because the ratio of dietary magnesium to calcium is necessary for ensuring a properly regulated relax-contract function. It’s not about how much dietary calcium or how much dietary magnesium we’re consuming — but what is the ratio?

And it is usually a deficiency of magnesium that is the problem — in other words, the magnesium to calcium ratio intake is significantly low. Not that one is consuming insufficient calcium as well, but that the magnesium that one derives from their diet simply doesn’t match up with their dietary calcium intake.

When the ratio is maintained properly, muscles can perform their relax-contract actions more effectively. Pockets of gas trapped within the many corners of the gastrointestinal tract can start moving again, and they’ll eventually escape via the rear end — or some people may also report that they ended up belching more, it can come up through the front end too.

The release of all this gas from the gastrointestinal tract can be likened to the release of air from a balloon. A deflated balloon takes up considerably less space than a full balloon. By releasing intestinal gas from my rear end, the space occupied by the contents of my abdominal cavity would be reduced.

However, as gases are extremely light compared to most other solid materials, there wouldn’t be a significant loss of weight — but my pants did start feeling more comfortable around the waistline.

Of course, there is more to gut health than just magnesium consumption. Retaining the activities of healthy microbial communities in the gastrointestinal tract is also absolutely necessary for our body to function optimally!

Magnesium consumption is just but one way to facilitate a healthy gut. Of course, a high dosage of it can result in the temporary development of diarrhoea — especially when the anal sphincter muscle gets so relaxed on the magnesium overdose that it just can’t hold in any faecal matter and releases it all at once — that’s how Epsom salts can be used as laxatives.

Not to mention the things that it can do to support healthy heart function, bone function and brain function too!

But interestingly, that was how I started to reduce my waistline before the fat burning helped to enhance it even further.

Do feel free to refer to What Nutrients Support Digestion And Detox In Our Body? to see what other nutrients are necessary to support our gut and digestive health! You’d find that a good balance of magnesium and calcium does help to support it, but we’d also have to be ensuring that food moves out of our digestive system as efficiently as possible!

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