Beat the bloat: High-potassium foods flush sodium from your system

That stiff or puffy feeling the morning after a fancy dinner probably isn’t because you suddenly gained five pounds of fat, which usually comes on or burns off more gradually. When something seems to have transformed your figure overnight, it’s more likely due to salt and retaining water.

Your body uses salt (sodium) in balance with other electrolytes. Potassium pulls water into your body’s cells, such as helping your muscles swell after a workout, whereas sodium pulls water into blood serum and other fluids between cells. Too much sodium can increase your blood pressure and make you look and feel puffy.

Not only do salt and potassium help balance each other, but eating more potassium along with drinking water helps your kidneys flush extra sodium out of your body.

Bananas are a famous source of potassium, but all unsalted fruits and vegetables can help re-balance your body after a salty meal, and you might be surprised by which foods have more than bananas.

High Potassium Foods

Fruit or Vegetable Juice

There’s a mega-dose of potassium in a serving of freshly-juiced vegetable juice — the greener, the better — but canned or store-bought vegetable juice can have a lot of added sodium that cancels the bloat-beating benefit of potassium, so be sure to read the nutrition label. Orange juice contains a good amount of potassium too.

Fresh Greens

Beware — potassium will leach out into the water when vegetables are boiled or canned, which removes it from your meal. But but steamed, sautéed or fresh greens are an excellent source.

Beans

Beans are not only high in potassium but are great sources of protein, antioxidants and fiber.

Potatoes

Believe it or not, a large baked potato (cooked with the skin on) has more than twice as much potassium as a banana.

Avocado

The good news is that one of the tastiest health foods is an excellent source of potassium. The bad news is that most preparations of guacamole have a lot of salt, too, so read nutrition labels or make your own low-salt guac to be sure.

Dried fruit

Raisins, dried apricots, banana chips or any other dried fruit provides a concentrated source potassium because you can eat larger quantities of fruit, which keep the same amount of potassium as when they were fresh.