This was a Layne Norton post! Love it.

So many people talk about 'tricking' the body. Let's examine this for a minute

Anytime you play with your water/sodium balance you are going to have two problems

1. it may give you an effect for a short period of time, but the body will RAPIDLY initiate a movement in the opposite direction and
2. it may not be the effect you want.

*stole those lines from Dr. Joe*

for example when you play with water balance by cutting water, cutting sodium, taking a salt bath etc. the idea is you will lose water. Great. where is the water coming from? Everyone assumes subcutaneously. In your basal state you store THE MAJORITY of water inside your cells, but when you start messing with stuff is when **** gets all messed up. so when you 'drop water' much of it come intra cellularly. I have yet to understand why everyone thinks all this water they are dropping will just come from outside the cell... nonsense. the body has to maintain a gradient & ratio of water inside & outside the cells. when you drop water you are dropping it from INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE CELL. Since you store more water inside the cell you can be damned sure much of it is coming from inside the cell... ie flattening you out.

Now lets look at what you've done to yourself by doing this. By 'dropping water or sodium' your body will IMMEDIATELY start to reduce sodium excretion and increase sodium reabsorption. To reabsorb sodium; the body also has to reabsorb water as well but since you have lowered the blood pressure in your vascular system by dropping water/sodium there will not be enough pressure to keep the water in the vascular system and it leaks into the interstitial IE SUBCUTANEOUS LAYER! This reabsorption starts happening withing minutes/hours of the body sensing it is deprived. All you have done is effectively flatten yourself out and move what water you have left where you DON'T want it and making yourself feel like ****. There is NO TRICKING YOUR BODY. In fact there was a study done that looked at what happened when people were effectively cut off from sodium intake. What they found was shocking. After 6 days of sodium depletion their levels of sodium HAD NOT CHANGED! The body conserved it perfectly by totally shutting down kidney sodium excretion and increasing resorption. In just 2 days of sodium depletion they also found that aldosterone had DOUBLED. For those that don't know... aldosterone is a hormone that increases water retention.

so much for tricking your body. There is no tricking it. Get your ass in shape and completely shredded and you don't need tricks. I garuntee you that the driest guys you see on stage looked almost exactly like that BEFORE the final week. When someone says they were 'holding water' you can translate that directly into "My ass was not in shape"