If you've been following along with my work for any length of time, you know I'm not big on chasing symptoms or treating diseases by name. We clean and nourish the system that's affected, then let the body do its job.

Picture the best-kept saltwater aquarium you've ever stood in front of. Clear water, fish moving easy, color bright, everything alive and working. Now ask what keeps it that way. Not the fish. The water. The fish are only as good as what they swim in.

Your body runs on that same rule. You are a tank. Your cells are the fish. And the fluid around them has to stay inside a narrow range or the fish start suffering, long before anything looks wrong from across the room.

So this post does two things, in this order. First it shows you how to test your salts number at home. Then it shows you what that number tells you to drink. Everything after that is the why.

This blog is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prescribe for any condition. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice.

I want to be clear that we're working in a different realm here. We're looking at a number that nobody else measures, and we're seeing how that specific number affects the whole body in distinct ways. Some of the terms I use may sound like the major terms doctors use, but they are not.

Remember, we are not measuring dietary salt. The salts number is a conductivity reading of your urine, measuring how much electrical current is moving through your body fluid right now. Not what you ate. Not how much salt you sprinkled on dinner. The current actually flowing at the moment you test.

Step by step:

Your meter may switch between two units. Look at the size of the number on the screen:

600 divided by 25 = 24C. .60 times 40 = 24C.

The size tells you the unit. A diluted urine sample can never legitimately read above single digits in milliSiemens — that would be a salinity no human survives. So a big number is always the micro scale, every time.

The ideal sits around 6.5C. Your body can regulate on its own anywhere from about 6C to 14C, and that whole band is the healing range, the place you want to be. Anything in there is workable and the body handles it.

Numbers climbing past 14C are where you want to start paying attention. That is why the water add-on in Part Two starts at 15C, just past the top of the range. There is more on why this range matters so much in the nervous system section further down.

Fine as a fast reference. Not as accurate as the diluted method. Use it to confirm a trend, not to make decisions. Same steps, but skip the water. Urine only.

10.00 times 1.43 = 14.3C. 10,000 divided by 700 = 14.3C.

Your meter handles temperature on its own, so there is nothing to set.

Two sanity checks, so a unit slip never becomes a wrong decision:

Before you buy: the Hanna DIST 4 is the reference standard most RBTI practitioners use, around $80 to $95. Cheaper meters exist, but verify they match a Hanna reading before you run clients on them, because consistent numbers across visits are worth more than a lower price.

Start with your baseline: drink 2% of your body weight in ounces every 30 minutes. A 200 lb person drinks 4 oz every half hour. That is the maintenance pace, and it holds whether or not your reading is out of range.

Then add for your C:

You start adding at 15C, you are up half an ounce per drink at 25C, and you hit the full extra ounce at 35C. Past 35C, nothing more is added.

Example: 205 lbs at 25C. Baseline 205 times 2% = about 4 oz. Add 1/2 oz for 25C. Drink about 4 1/2 oz every 30 minutes.

Same rule, math done for you. Two numbers to remember:

These are a starting point, not a lab number. They will get you where you need to be for the day, and for most people that is all they will ever need. If you want your precise numbers — the exact amount for your body at your specific reading — that is what the software I am building does. The blog gives you a good working number to start with. The software gives you the exact one.

The one condition. That 50% only counts if you drink it properly. Your body can only use 2.5% of your body weight in ounces in any thirty-minute window. The daily total is real only when it arrives in those increments. Drink the whole day's water in two or three sittings and most of it leaves as urine before it ever reaches a cell.

Worked example: a 205 lb person at 25C. Maintenance total: 40% of 205 = about 82 oz a day. At 25C that is about 4 1/2 oz every thirty minutes, roughly 90 oz across the day. If salts need flushing, up to 50% of 205 = about 102 oz, still spread in the same thirty-minute paces.

Too much water, too few electrolytes. Water has nothing to hold it in place. You wash the electrolytes out, the water runs straight through, and the cells stay dry even while you are drinking all day.

Too many electrolytes, too little water. Now water follows the salt, gets pulled to the salty side and bound up there. It cannot cross the membrane in and out the way it should. You can be swollen and still have cells that never get a drink.

Same symptom, opposite cause. That is why you measure your C before you decide what to drink, not after.

Maintenance first. 2% of your body weight in ounces every 30 minutes, roughly ten hours a day. A 200 lb person drinks 4 oz every half hour. That is the base every body needs, whatever the reading. Everything above that is doing a job.

Roughly half again your maintenance amount, so about 1.5 times. The 205 lb person goes from 4 oz to roughly 6 oz per half hour. When you are exercising, drink as much as you like. This is the one place you do not need to measure.

What is in the coolant depends entirely on your C:

If plain water during hard exercise sits heavy on you, a little something in it helps your body pick it up. Not an electrolyte drink, just enough to carry it across. If you can handle plain water, plain water is still the best choice.

Your body can only take in and use so much in a thirty-minute window. Everything up to that limit becomes cellular hydration, and it does the work of carrying salts out. Past it, the extra has nowhere to go but out, as urine or sweat.

That limit is 2.5% of your body weight in ounces in a thirty-minute window. Drink more than that in half an hour and you do not get extra cellular hydration. You do not get extra moisture into the cells. You do not get extra salt flushed out. You get urine, and you get sweat. The extra is doing one of two smaller jobs at that point: diluting the concentration of your urine, or serving as coolant. Neither one is hydration.

This is why drinking on schedule beats drinking more at once to catch up. The man who drinks a quart at 8pm because he missed water all day is not paying down a debt. Past the ceiling, every ounce after that is urine or sweat.

How it stacks up: maintenance is 2%. The usable band is up to 2.5%, and that is the same ceiling as your per-drink maximum. Above your C-based amount, up to 2.5%, the extra is working — cleaning and cooling. Above 2.5% in a half hour, it is leaving, and it does not count.

Every tank has a salinity dial. Get it right and everything downstream works. Get it wrong and it does not matter how good the food is.

Your salts number is that dial. It measures how much electrical current is moving through your body fluid right now, not what you ate and not how much salt you sprinkled on dinner.

Here is the part almost nobody gets: table salt is only 1/49 of what is being measured. Your kidneys move about 48 different electrolytic agents out through urine every day, in three families: chlorides, non-chlorides, and protein types. Sodium chloride is one of them. A loud one. Not the whole story.

So when someone says "but I hardly eat any salt," they are answering a question nobody asked.

Keep the tank in mind. In the Dead Sea, the water is so loaded with salt that nothing can live in it. Fish do not adapt. They float.

High salts does a version of that inside you. When conductivity climbs too high, the current running through your fluid is stronger than the tissue was built to carry. That creates friction, and friction makes heat.

Two things happen with that heat.

It thickens things. Your blood is meant to be a suspension: cells floating separately, each doing its own job. High current breaks that up. Cells start clumping, the fluid gets heavier, and now it is harder to push through vessels built for something thinner. Cholesterol settling on the walls is part of this, not a separate disease.

It dries things out. High salt pulls water the wrong way across your membranes, the same way salt pulls water out of a slug. Fluid gets pulled out of the joints and tissue that need it and held where it does not belong. That is why a high-salts person is often stiff in the knees and swollen in the ankles at the same time.

Example: someone whose feet are puffy by 5pm and whose hands ache in the morning usually does not have two problems. It is one current problem showing up in two places. The usual fix is a diuretic, which forces the kidneys to let go of fluid they were holding for a reason and never touches the reason. So it comes back every time the pills stop.

Here is why this number touches everything: it hits smooth muscle, and smooth muscle is nearly everywhere.

Smooth muscle is the muscle you do not think about. It lines every blood vessel, every lymph channel, every gland duct, every organ wall, the whole digestive tract from throat to colon, and the tiny muscles in the eyes and middle ear.

The heart is the one exception. It is a different kind of muscle. It still takes the strain, just through its own road.

Push too much current through that muscle and it does what a wire does when you overload it. It heats, it weakens, and where it is weakest it starts to give.

That weakness shows up differently depending on where the weak spot sits:

None of this starts with a symptom. It starts years earlier, in the water, while you feel fine.

Your nervous system runs on electricity. Every thought, every feeling, every signal from your gut to your brain is a current traveling a wire. Your salts number is how much current is available to send.

Ideally, that number sits around 6.5C. That is the voltage your nervous system was built to run on.

The healing range. Your number does not have to sit exactly on 6.5. The body can regulate on its own anywhere from about 6C to 14C, and that whole band is the healing range, the place you want to be. Inside it, the body handles the extra current without much trouble. At 13C you are carrying roughly twice the ideal current, and a healthy body compensates for that. You usually will not notice the intensity at all.

pH decides how it feels. Electricity moves faster through an acid environment, so if your pH is also low, that extra current can come through as intensity even inside the healing range. If your pH is high, the fluid resists the current, so you probably will not feel it as intensity. But resistance makes heat, so a high pH turns the same current into warmth instead. Same electricity, three different experiences, depending on where your pH sits.

Above the range is where it bites. Twice the reading, twice the current. At 40C, you are working with roughly six times the current your body was built for. That is well past anything it can compensate for on its own, and that is when every sensation, every thought, every emotional signal arrives at several times its proper intensity.

What that feels like: everything is louder than it should be. Lights are brighter, sounds are sharper, small frustrations land like big ones, and the mind won't slow down. That's not a personality trait. It's current. And it explains a pattern I see constantly.

The kids. When I test children who've been labeled ADD or ADHD, their salts are very often up in the 40s or higher. Everything they feel is arriving at several times the intensity it should. The world isn't too much for them because of who they are. It's too much because of how loud the current is. Bring the water up, bring the number back toward range, and the intensity cools down.

When it runs low, you get the other side. The current is too weak to carry the signal, so thinking gets foggy, focus slips, and everything feels slow and dim.

The emotional piece, and this is the one worth circling. If your salts are high, anxiety and emotional intensity get magnified, sometimes several times over. And here's what matters most: you can take the herbs, you can take the medication, and they'll help. But if your salts are high, you may be fighting a signal that's three or four times stronger than it needs to be. Get enough water to bring the number down, and the intensity you're trying to manage can fall to a fraction of what it was, with nothing else changed.

Water is the cheapest lever you have on how intense everything feels. Worth pulling before you reach for anything stronger.

Back to the tank. If your aquarium tests high on salinity, you do not fix it by taking the salt shaker away from the fish. You find out why the tank stopped clearing salt in the first place.

In your body that job belongs to the liver and the kidneys, and the liver needs three things before it can do it. Water. The right calcium. And iron and B-12 working together.

Here is the chain, plainly. Waste salts come out of normal metabolism every day. The liver is supposed to chemically tie those waste salts up into a harmless, non-soluble form, and then the kidneys flush them out. That is the whole system.

But the liver cannot do that step without enough water to run the reaction in, and the right calcium to bind the waste to. Iron and B-12 have to be there together too, because iron without B-12 does not get picked up, and B-12 without iron does not finish the enzyme. Both, or the job does not get done.

Miss any one of the three and the waste salts do not get tied up. They stay soluble. They stay in circulation. They load the tank, and then every symptom in the last section gets its chance to start.

Example: this is the person who has cut salt, cut processed food, eaten clean for a year, and their salts number has not budged. Nothing was wrong with their food. They were drinking three cups of coffee and a glass of water a day, and their calcium was never the right type. The shaker was never the problem.

If you change one thing after reading this, change your water.

Every glass of mineral water, spring water, or filtered water puts a little more mineral load into a tank your kidneys are already struggling to clear. That sounds backwards, because every label on the shelf tells you minerals are the healthy part. For a person with healthy kidneys and low salts, maybe. For a person running high salts, those minerals are one more thing the filter has to process.

Distilled water adds nothing. It is just H2O, nothing for the system to break down, nothing left to clear. You are not adding something to your protocol. You are removing a hidden load you never knew you were carrying.

How much: aim for about 40% of your body weight in ounces across the day for maintenance, and up to about 50% if you are working to clear salts. The full breakdown sits in Part Two at the top of this post. A 200-pound person is around 80 ounces for maintenance, about 100 if flushing.

Timing matters as much as the total. Eighty ounces in two sittings does not hydrate you the same way as four ounces every thirty minutes. The tank can only take in so much at once. The rest runs straight through without ever reaching the fish.

Example: drinking a quart at night because you realized at 8pm you had not had water all day does almost nothing for you except get you up twice to pee. The same quart spread across the day is the whole difference.

One warning: heat. Sauna, hot bath, hot tub, hot weather, all of it pulls water out through your skin. Keep sweating without replacing it and your kidneys get shorted, which raises the risk of stones and lowers your ability to clear salt at the same time. If you are doing heat therapy on a salt program, drink noticeably more that day. Some people add a third to a half again on top of their baseline.

Everything so far has been about the tank running too salty. It can also run too weak, and that looks completely different.

When conductivity drops too low, the current is not strong enough to carry messages between organs and tissue. The lights dim. Signals fail.

What it looks like: sluggish and slow, both body and brain. Coordination drops. Muscles get cold and tired. And in children, one of the earliest signs is being slow to walk, because the electrical signal to the legs is not arriving with enough strength to organize the movement.

That last one matters to parents. A kid who is late to walk is often handed a developmental label when the water simply was not carrying enough current.

A tank has one control panel, not six separate gauges you read alone. Your numbers work the same way. Change one and you have changed the others.

Salts and sugar. Sugar is non-ionic, so it does not add to the reading directly, but it interferes with how the current is measured. When sugar is high, your salts reading will look slightly lower than it really is. Correct for it before you make a decision on it. Three patterns are worth knowing by heart:

Salts and urea. The urea number is built on nitrogen, and some of that nitrogen is a salt. The two numbers are connected. When urea is high, part of what you are seeing is nitrogen salt. When salts is high, part of what you are seeing is soluble urea salt. You cannot fully separate them, but knowing they move together explains why both climb at once sometimes.

The rule underneath all of it: a change in one number is a change in every number. Chasing a single dial inside a connected machine is how people make one thing better and something else worse without noticing.

This is the one that scares people, and it should not.

When your chemistry starts moving in the right direction, your body finally gets access to waste salt it had been storing in body fat. It mobilizes that old waste out through the kidneys. Your salts reading spikes.

Nothing new was created. That salt was already in the tank, stored, buffered, doing nothing but sitting there. The spike is old waste finally leaving. It is the tank being filtered for the first time in years.

Example: you are three weeks into the program, you feel better than you have in a year, and your salts number comes back higher than when you started. That is not failure. That is the stored waste moving out. It settles back down lower than it started once the backlog clears.

So if you spike mid-program, do not panic and do not stop. Look at the whole picture. If sleep is better, digestion is better, and energy is coming up while the number looks worse, the chemistry is moving in the right direction and the number is just showing you the work in progress.

Your salts number is the salinity dial on the tank. You want it in the middle, not high and not low. When it runs high, it is almost never the salt shaker. It is water and calcium, and a liver that cannot clear what is piling up. When it runs low, messages stop getting through.

Fix the water, add the right calcium, support the liver, give the tissue time to repair, and the current comes back into range on its own. Bring the water right and everything living in it gets its chance to be healthy again. That is the whole point of cleaning and nourishing the system instead of chasing the symptom.

Read your numbers together the way you would read one control panel. Do it before the fish are floating.

If you want help walking through your own numbers or figuring out what fits where you're sitting right now, that's exactly what I do with clients every week.

You can book a session here

We'll go through all your numbers together and build a plan that matches what your body's actually telling us rather than what some generic article online says you should do.