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Almost everyone experiences the occasional muscle cramp. But for some of us, it’s a daily nuisance that becomes harder and harder to ignore.
Muscle pain, twitching, cramping after a workout (or even worse, any time at all) charley horses while sleeping, and even digestive cramping can be incredibly painful and just plain annoying.
As we age, the problem only gets worse, and it’s easy to assume that it’s part of life and that nothing can be done to stop cramping.
Or people tell you to eat more bananas because you must be deficient in potassium.
Unfortunately, I’ve got news for you. While potassium might be part of the solution, bananas aren’t going to help you.
To discover why and what the real solution is, let’s dig in and find out the reason WHY we get muscle cramps and go over some simple ways to prevent them from happening.
The Problem
I’ve got a question for you… If you stand on an iceberg wearing nothing but shorts, what will happen?
Well, if you stand there long enough, you will die because you’ll lose too much heat, right? But before that happens, your body will start to shiver and will expend massive amounts of energy to generate enough heat to maintain your body’s ideal temperature of 98.6 degrees.
Next, your body will start to move all the blood from the arms and legs to the vital organs.
Why? To keep you alive, of course.
That’s right; your body will sacrifice its big toe to keep you alive. But you’d better get off the iceberg!
It’s no different with the pH of your blood. Both work like thermostats. In the case of pH, it always tightly regulates itself at 7.365 (on a scale of 0-14, where 0 is pure acid and 14 is pure alkaline, 7 is neutral).
If you’re not getting enough minerals from the foods you eat and drink to neutralize the acid in your body, your body will find any alkaline mineral store that’s available.
Just like your big toe, it will sacrifice other parts of your body (and will steal minerals from you own body parts!) to keep your pH at the proper level.
First, it will grab minerals from your mouth, which can lead to tooth decay. Unfortunately, your mouth doesn’t have a big supply, so it moves on to other sources.
Next, it goes after magnesium from one of your largest magnesium mineral banks - your muscles. When your body depletes magnesium from you muscles to neutralize ACID in you blood to keep your blood pH stable, what is the result?
You got it! MUSCLE PAIN, MUSCLE CRAMPS, MUSCLE FATIGUE!
So that means if you’re experiencing muscle cramps, you want to stop the search for minerals then and there. Because the last place it goes searching is its greatest mineral bank, your bones. So in order to prevent joint pain, osteoporosis, and osteoarthritis, it’s time to take action now.
The Culprits
If you’re experiencing muscle pain and cramping, your body is telling you it needs more alkaline foods and less acid (and remember this from previous blogs, acid can develop from STRESS as well).
Highly acidic foods and beverages rob your body of alkaline minerals needed to regulate its blood pH.
Examples of these acidic foods include…
- Sugar
- Soda
- Alcohol
- Processed foods
- Meat
- Dairy
- Artificial sweeteners
- MSG
- Coffee
- Carbonated water
- Gluten
Those foods actually prevent your body from absorbing and using vitamin D and magnesium from other foods you eat.
So if you drink a soft drink, which can have a pH anywhere from 2 to 3 on the scale of 0-14 with 0 being battery acid, what you’re consuming is 10,000 times more acidic than tap water.
So your body will begin to deplete its own resources and pull minerals from your mouth, muscles, and bones as your ‘alkaline buffer system’ to neutralize all that acid in the soft drink.
The Super Heroes
Fortunately, you don’t just have to deny yourself of foods you love that are robbing your bones.
You can replace them with healthy, delicious foods that not only help your body regulate your pH more easily, they actually add magnesium, which cramping muscles are crying out for.
These foods are all rich alkaline sources of magnesium…
- Dark, leafy greens like spinach, kale, and chard
- Seaweed
- Sunflower, sesame, pumpkin, and squash seeds
- Almonds
- Cashews
- Pine nuts
- Avocados
- White beans, kidney beans, lentils, and chickpeas
- Quinoa
- Brown rice
- Buckwheat
Make sure you’re getting plenty of these foods if you’re experiencing muscle cramping. In addition, you’ll want to add in a supplement that contains plenty of magnesium, potassium, and sodium bicarbonate so your body stays in balance, even after working out.
For that reason, I take AlkaMind Daily Minerals within 15 minutes after exercise to neutralize the lactic acid that builds up in the muscles, as well as 30 minutes before going to sleep every single night.
Find out more about Daily Minerals now.
Sources: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/01/19/magnesium-deficiency.aspx
http://www.healthaliciousness.com/articles/foods-high-in-magnesium.php
