It’s interesting to note how much water we can take on without realising. In this article, researchers commented that:
Our findings agree with the long held notion that each gram of glycogen is stored in human muscle with at least 3 g of water.
Firstly, we’d have to understand what is glycogen. According to the Cleveland Clinic:
Glycogen is the stored form of glucose that’s made up of many connected glucose molecules.
Glucose (sugar) is your body’s main source of energy. It comes from carbohydrates (a macronutrient) in certain foods and fluids you consume. When your body doesn’t immediately need glucose from the food you eat for energy, it stores glucose primarily in your muscles and liver as glycogen for later use.
Our body creates glycogen from glucose through a process called glycogenesis. Your body breaks down glycogen for use through a process called glycogenolysis. Several different enzymes are responsible for these two processes.
What these statements mean is that we’d be taking in glucose from our daily diets via carbohydrate consumption. Any excess glucose that our body doesn’t really need is converted into glycogen via glycogenesis and stored in our muscles and liver. Much like a savings account in a bank stores the excess cash that we don’t necessarily need to spend at the moment.
The glycogen reserves are called upon when we need additional energy — glycogen is decomposed back into glucose via glycogenolysis and the cells in our body can then make use of the glucose to generate energy again.
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Now, every gram of stored glycogen pulls 3 grams of water with it. If we were to consume more glucose than we need, we’d store it as glycogen, and stored glycogen also accumulates water — which can lead to water retention.
Hence it is immediately apparent that a diet rich in carbohydrates can promote water retention, and switching out some carbohydrates for other energy sources such as fats may help to cut down the water retention.
Which does sound counter-intuitive. Most people do believe that the consumption of fats will cause weight gain, and tend to shy away from it.
But at the same time, the consumption of excess carbohydrates will cause weight gain, too. It’s not as healthy as it seems. We explore the idea of water retention here, where the storage of glucose as glycogen traps water in our bodies.
We can even see how fatty livers can develop as a result of carbohydrate overconsumption, much like how geese are force fed grains for them to get fatty livers (foie gras):
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There are many delicacies around the world that do cater to the well-heeled clientele. In France, we do see how geese are bred for the purpose of killing them and extracting their fatty livers — which are more commonly known as foie gras. A PETA article commented that
But we shouldn’t be lulled into the idea that weight loss is an easy thing to carry out or to sustain, even. Much discipline is required to eat right and work out — we can’t just expect to eat pizza all day in front of the television watching Netflix and wonder why we aren’t losing weight, can we?
Though if we are disciplined in cutting them out, we’d see ourselves losing quite a fair bit of water weight, and that’s also instrumental in looking less waterlogged and more healthy.
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