Anyone with Experience of Water Retention?

I’m training my wife (remotely, she’s in the US and I’m emigrating next month). She’s no stranger to weights but had major issues with, what we thought, was body fat increase on a restricted diet.

Won’t go into details as I’ve posted this before and got some good advice and this is a follow up. So, after doing some digging I am really starting to suspect that it’s not so much body fat as water retention! She went though a divorce, had a few years of bad sleep, then noticed some body changes and started doing fairly harsh diets like keto mixed with IF but very sporadic training. The ‘weight’ kept going up.

So I got the living shit flamed out of me for having a lying cake-eating fat wife, until one day someone suggested it was water. She had an enlarged thyroid nodule once and I was already looking into low thyroid levels and just recently found out that water retention can occur with low T3. She has puffy bags under her eyes and overall her face and neck looks slightly puffy.

So I’m wondering if any women, or anyone has trained women who have had this, and, what’s best to do about it?

*presently she’s bodybuidling 3-4 days per week, eats well, takes BCAAs and protein supps etc. trying to build mass before a cut later on.

thanks!

for a start drink a bucket load of water between meals and during training.Also get her on a good mineral supp and make sure the bcaas have added electrolytes

Cool thanks, I’ll pass that on and look into the minerals thing. :slight_smile:

Estrogen is what is causing the water bloof, women’s estrogen lvls can be drastically different from one another but it is most likely the cause of severe water retention. Also diet, sodium, cake, soft beverages will cause severe bloat and water retention.

would you say abnormal/elevated levels of oestrogen? and something that could be remedied? she doesn’t have any bad dietary habits except coffee.

The other replies are excellent, but for whatever it’s worth, I found out I have an allergy to sulfates (found in wine), causes swelling /water retention. I confess I used to have about two glasses on weekend nights. Gave it up and along with some other lifestyle adjustments and lost a lot (100 total). This website has a diet 3 days low carbs 4th carbs on and it really works great for me.