Are you tired of dealing with pitting edema, swollen legs, and a round face that hints at underlying blood sugar issues? These symptoms can be frustrating and often linked to various health problems such as liver, kidney, or heart issues. You might even be worried that you’re consuming too much sodium. These concerns can be overwhelming and confusing. I can understand the anxiety of not knowing the root cause of your edema, and the fear of relying on medications like blood thinners or diuretics that come with unwanted side effects.

push the fluid out. I mean, those come with side effects.

 

When you have fluid retention, especially in your lower legs and ankles, this boils down to a problem with these little tiny pumps that are not working in your cells. You have millions and millions of these little tiny pumps that push fluid in and out of the cell. The specific pump that’s not working in this case is called the sodium-potassium pump.

 

The Sodium-Potassium Pump

There are some really interesting things about this pump. It uses like 30

to 40% of all the energy that is given to that cell. But if that pump goes bad, like in our house when the pump went bad, we had about a foot of water in our basement. If the pump goes bad in your body, you’re going to have a lot of fluid that is not going to be in the cells; it’s going to be outside the cells, and that’s called interstitial fluid retention.

 

Glycation and Blood Sugar

What’s really going on in your lower ankles is you’re getting

a condition where your sugar in the blood is too high. All that sugar is connected to the protein in the blood called hemoglobin. What happens when this sugar connects to the protein in your blood is called glycation. This is a term used when you hear of the A1C test, which measures how much sugar is stuck to your blood protein and gives you an average over about three months, as red blood cells survive about three months.

 

When this sugar gets stuck to the blood protein, it doesn’t