For the people about to do a show and take diuretic.
For all of you guys out there that are competing soon and are going to use diuretics, here is a little something about potassium replacement. As we all know diuretics can cause potassium excretion from your body, especially non-potassium sparing once like Lasix, Diamox; and the alike (I will be using Lasix for my up coming show). So how should we be dealing with potassium loss, well too much is just as dangerous as to little. Normally your body looses 20mEQ of Potassium per 1 liter of urine. So from the start of our diuretic regiment we need to measure every urination with a measuring cup. 39 mg of potassium equals 1 mEQ of potassium being replaced in your body. So if you urinate 0.125 of a liter you need to replace 2.5 mEQ of potassium by taking in 97.5 mg of potassium (39 mg times 2.5 mEQ equals 97.5 mg of potassium) I would just take 100 mg.
To sum it up:
1 liter of urine = 20 mEQ lost = 780 mg of potassium to replace the loss
0.5 liter of urine = 10 mEQ lost = 390 mg of potassium to replace the loss
0.25 liter of urine = 5 mEQ lost = 195 mg of potassium to replace the loss
0.125 liter of urine = 2.5 mEQ lost = 98 mg of potassium to replace the loss
Cramping is not just caused just by lack of potassium, but by electrolyte imbalance. So what I suggest is to take some magnesium, as well, I prefer Maalox tablet through out the day. I would not recommend cutting out sodium totally from your carb up either, because you need certain amount of sodium in lower intestine to absorb the carbs efficiently. You need some sodium in your body to achieve ¾ compensation in the first 24 hours and most people do a 3 day carb up which is already not that much time for the carbohydrate super-compensation required, just don’t add any salt to your food and you should be ok. Once you get dry and you think you are ready for the show I suggest replacing any water that is lost through the urination, because at that point most likely it’s intracellular fluid coming out of your muscle. I know that is hard to swallow and I will not drink any water, but for you more daring it might be an idea once you are totally dried up. I will be Drinking 250-500 ml of water mixed with 60 ml. of Glycerol first thing in the morning the day of my show and that will be the only water consumed by me.
Well I hope that helps some of you guys out there and good luck.