iHerb.com, the #1 online supplement store 4 years in a row. Save up to 70% off retail using my coupon code DOQ007 and you’ll also get $5.00 off your first order.
My parents have always told me to eat well, eat a lot of fruits and drink a lot of water and to urinate as frequently as possible. This is because urine retention was supposed to give you a number of problems out of which an infection was the least of their worries.
I got so accustomed to drinking water throughout the day that it seemed odd to me when people said that they always had yellowish urine. Mine was always clear white in color.
This practice always stood me in good stead because I had far fewer health problems than most others in my age group. Yet as I got older things started to change. I couldn’t eat as much as I used to because of weight issues, and fruits became almost nonexistent for me in my diet. I however continued to drink water throughout the day because it was almost a habit with me.
My hands started trembling first and I started getting cramps very frequently. I never thought much about it until I came across an article when searching for something else on the net. It was about magnesium deficiency and from all the information I could find it looked like I had all the classic symptoms of magnesium deficiency.
What is magnesium
Magnesium is a metal and is the 8th most abundant metal in the planet. It is found pretty much everywhere, each and every cell in our body has magnesium, plants have them, all animals have them. Even our brains have a lot of magnesium in them. There is pretty much nothing in the natural world that does not use magnesium.
What is magnesium used for
If you take the human body, magnesium is used for more than 300 different processes. Some of them may sound like very inconsequential things, but it is only when you start lacking it that you tend to feel it more. Very much like your little finger so to speak.
For instance, magnesium is essential in ensuring that the nervous and immune systems work properly, maintaining healthy bones and a regular heart beat rhythm. It also ensures that both the blood sugar and the blood pressure levels are normal. The list can go on and on, but we’ll come to that later.
What are the magnesium deficiency causes
Since magnesium is excreted in the urine, excess urination will leech magnesium from the body. Obviously my parents were not aware of this. It was only later that I realized that most doctors recommend that your urine is a light yellow, or corn yellow in color. It should not be perfectly white because it means that you are drinking too much water.
It looks like all the water I was drinking was leeching the magnesium out of my body. Because I was eating well when I was younger, it never was an issue, whatever was going out, I was getting more. As I started going older and cutting down on my food intake, things started to change.
While I wouldn’t say that my diet was actually bad, I too fell into not having breakfast because there just wasn’t time in the morning. A sandwich or a burger served for lunch, and even dinner was mostly either take out, or prepackaged something or the other, heated in the microwave.
I was just not getting enough magnesium in my food. Then comes alcohol. Whether you believe it or not alcohol is a diuretic which means that it makes you urinate more. The more alcohol you drink, the more water is leeched out of your body which is why when you drink too much you get a headache out of dehydration.
Although I didn’t have any other issues I also found that diabetics too suffer from a deficiency because they urinate frequently. People who have Crohn’s disease or celiac are not able to absorb enough through their intestines and people who have renal problems are not able to retain enough magnesium in their body.
What are the symptoms of magnesium deficiency?
Magnesium deficiency symptoms are generally classified as mild, moderate and severe. Thankfully it seems like I had a very mild case which was characterized by trembling and twitching in muscles, cramps, fatigue and sleep disturbances. Moderate deficiency will show symptoms like an irregular or rapid heart beat, hyper excitability and muscle weakness.
Severe deficiency can show symptoms like tingling in the limbs, numbness and involuntary muscular contractions, abnormal heart rhythms, coronary spasms, seizures, disorientation and hallucinations.
What must be noted is that many of these symptoms can also be caused due to other reasons, so self diagnosis is not a good idea if you are going to go in for supplement tablets.
What Can You Do?
If you are going to do what I did and start eating healthy, there’s no harm in self diagnosis at all. Food like almonds, cashews, soybean, spinach, cereal, oatmeal, potatoes, peanuts, peas, milk, bananas, resins and beans all are rich in magnesium. Including them in the daily diet is generally more than enough most of the time to set right any deficiency.
Even if you don’t show these symptoms, better keep this in mind before you start cutting down on your food to reduce weight. That was what landed me here in the first place.
