Undoing Creatine's Puffiness Side Effect

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Creatine can cause facial puffiness as a side effect, often alongside bloating.

  • Today’s main feature examines how to undo that, both generally and also in two works-in-minutes ways.

• We know that 10almonds readers don’t just want to look younger, but ideally to be younger, biologically speaking.

  • Today’s sponsor, time—line, is offering a supplement that we wrote about previously as part of Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight, a list of incredibly well-evidenced longevity-inducing things we can take (if you’re looking for it in the list, it’s urolithin A, which you can see in our sponsor’s store, here) ← 30% off for 10almonds readers with code NEWSLETTER30, by the way!

• Today’s featured book is about all kinds of healthy hormones and how to hack them!

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

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❝Creatine is known to increase “puffiness”, especially in my face. Are there any supplements that do the opposite?!❞

So first, let’s examine why this happens: creatine is most often taken to boost muscle size and performance. Your muscles are, of course, mostly water by mass, and so building your muscles requires extra water, which triggers systemic water retention.

In other words: you take creatine, exercise, and as the muscles start growing, the body goes “oh heck, we are running out of water, better save as much as possible in order to keep hydrating the muscles without running out” and starts putting it anywhere it can that's not your bladder, so this will largely be the soft tissues of your body.

So, this results in classic water retentions symptoms including bloating and, yes, facial puffiness.

How much this happens, and how long the effects last, depend on three main things:

• What daily dose of creatine you are taking

• What kind of exercise you are doing

• What your hydration is like

The dose is relevant as it’s most common to get this puffiness during the “loading” phase, i.e. if you’re taking an increased dose to start with.

The exercise is relevant as it affects how much your body is actually using the water to build muscles.

The hydration is relevant because the less water you are taking, the more the body will try to retain whatever you do have.

This means, of course, that the supplement you are looking for to undo the facial puffiness is, in fact, water (even, nay, especially, if you feel bloated too):

Water For Everything? Water’s Counterintuitive Properties

Additionally, you could scale back the dose of creatine you’re taking, if you’re not currently doing heavy muscle-building exercise.

That said, the recommended dose for cognitive benefits is 5g/day, which is a very standard main-phase (i.e., post-loading) bodybuilding dose, so do with that information what you will.

See also: Creatine’s Brain Benefits Increase With Age

On which note: whether or not you want to take creatine for brain benefits, however, may depend on your age:

Creatine: Very Different For Young & Old People

Most research on creatine’s effects on humans has usually been either collegiate athletes or seniors, which leaves quite a research gap in the middle—so it’s unclear at what age the muscle-building effects begin to taper off, and at what age the cognitive benefits begin to take off.

Want a quicker fix?

If you want to reduce your facial puffiness acutely (e.g., you have a date in an hour and would like to not have a puffy face), then there are two things you can do that will help immediately, and/but only have short-term effects, meaning you’d have to do them daily to enjoy the results every day:

The first is an ice bath; simply fill a large bowl with water and ice cubes, give it a couple of minutes to get down to temperature, hold your breath and plunge your face in for as long as you can comfortably hold your breath. Repeat a few times, and towel off.

This helps by waking up the vasculature in your face, helping it to reduce puffiness naturally.

The second is facial yoga or guā shā, which is the practice of physically manipulating the soft tissues of your face to put them where you want them, rather than where you don’t want them. This will work against water retention puffiness, as well as cortisol puffiness, lymphatic puffiness, and more:

7-Minute Face Fitness For Lymphatic Drainage & Youthful Jawline

Enjoy!

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Bonus (Sponsored) Recommendation

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One-Minute Book Review

The Power of Hormones: The New Science of How Hormones Impact Every Aspect of Our Health – by Dr. Max Nieuwdorp

First a quick note on the author: he’s an MD & PhD, internist, endocrinologist, and professor. He knows his stuff.

There are a lot of books with “the new science of” in the title, and they don’t often pertain to science that is actually new, and in this case, for the most part the science contained within this book is quite well-established.

A strength of this book is that it’s not talking about hormones in just one specific aspect (e.g. menopause, pregnancy, etc) but rather, in the full span of human health, across the spectra of ages and sexes—and yes, also covering hormones that are not sex hormones, so for example also demystifying the different happiness-related neurotransmitters, as well as the hormones responsible for hunger and satiety, weight loss and gain, sleep and wakefulness, etc.

Which is all very good, because there’s a lot of overlap and several hormones fall into several categories there.

Moreover, the book covers how your personal cocktail of hormones impacts how you look, feel, behave, and more—there’s a lot about chronic health issues here too, and how to use the information in this book to if not outright cure, then at least ameliorate, many conditions.

Bottom line: this is an information-dense book with a lot of details great and small; if you read this, you’ll come away with a much better understanding of hormones than you had previously!

Click here to check out The Power of Hormones, and harness that power for yourself!

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Wishing you the best of health every day, in every way,

The 10almonds Team