Last Updated on March 30, 2010

How Potassium Can Boost Your Metabolism

When is comes to your boosting your metabolism, potassium a dieter’s best friend.

Think back to when the New Year’s weight loss resolution was made, then broken and now reinstituted in the frenzy to be ready for the dreaded swim suit season. This yearly cycle…diet-slack off-now really diet like you mean it, has occurred in the lives of weight challenged people since the inception of New Years resolutions and swim suit season.

Along with changing your eating habits, you may want to add a little something to boost your efforts along. It’s not new, it’s not radical, but it does work. What is this wonderous substance? Potassium. New studies show that potassium might be a great place to start boosting your metabolism and your weight loss efforts.

A Balancing Act

The foods we eat can help us win the weight war in more ways than being on a diet low in calories and fat. The body is a complex system that functions best when all areas are balanced and happy. Like pulling on a loose string of a knit sweater, when one system is out of whack it affects others making them perform at less than optimal levels.

The foods we eat can really help reboot the whole system and get it back on track. One of the first body functions that seems to slow down and perform at less than optimal levels is the metabolism. This is not great news for anyone, but is especially devastating for dieters. If the metabolism is sluggish any efforts at weight loss will likewise be sluggish.

Potassium is not a magic fat killing super supplement, but it can help the body figure out where the rev-up knobs on the metabolism are. It works in a back door sort of approach. Because the role of potassium in weight loss functions more like a middle man, it has often been discounted.

This is changing. The top 10 foods for dieters…sea foods, nuts and cheese are all high in potassium content. Fruits and veggies, no brainer diet foods, are also universally high in potassium.

How Does It Work?

Well, potassium might not directly affect the metabolism, but it does affect the body’s ability to use nutrients that do interact with the metabolism in powerful ways. People low in iron have classically low metabolisms. In fact there is even a nifty illness called anemia to describe the lack of energy resulting from low iron levels. Yet iron supplements don’t solve the problem.

Why Not?

The problem is that an iron deficiency might not have been what caused low iron levels in the body. Without proper potassium levels the body is unable to process iron and make use of it. This is true of other metabolism boosting nutrients like magnesium and calcium.

Along with dieting, try supplementing. It doesn’t have to be difficult. There are a few changes in the way one eats that can make a big difference in the girth of one’s waistline. This does not give anyone permission to eat three cheese cakes then pop a neat little potassium supplement expecting it to cancel out binge calories. It only works that way in dreams. With a balanced diet and a potassium boost most people can get the metabolism boost they need.