Water Retention And Psoriatic Arthritis

Some years ago I was consulted by a lady called Sally who had been told she had psoriatic arthritis. This is a combination of painful joints (in Sally’s case her fingers) and a skin disease known as psoriasis, which makes patches of your skin red and unsightly.

Since painful joints are often caused by water retention, I thought it was likely that the same metabolic imbalance in her body was causing both the water retention and the psoriasis and that maybe both could be helped with the Waterfall Diet. So I put Sally on the Waterfall Diet on a trial basis, and waited to see what would happen.

I was really expecting Sally’s condition to improve, but when she returned after two weeks, her joint pains were as bad as ever. Then I discovered that Sally had unknowingly been cheating on the diet. While she knew that for the first few weeks she was not allowed to eat salt, I had forgotten to tell her that smoked fish has a high salt content. Sally loved these and had been eating them every day.

Sally loved anything salty. She had always sprinkled her food liberally with salt even when the food was already salted. Unsalted food would get a double helping.

Sally spent a very unhappy few days eating food which she did not much enjoy at all, but she soon gained the tremendous benefit of pain-free fingers. She felt so much better that it became quite easy for her to stick to the diet.

Sally also lost 3 lbs in water weight very quickly. Salt plays a key role in your fluid balance because it dictates how your kidneys behave. The salt in Sally’s diet was interfering with her kidneys and the resulting water retention was making her fingers hurt.