I haven’t paid a lot of attention to electrolytes since starting on a keto diet about 6 weeks ago. Mostly, I’ve felt pretty good without much of an issue anywhere. Not even “keto flu”. And I’ve lost weight. I’m 2 pounds away from my first goal (23 pounds, which was what I weighed 2.5 years ago when I broke my leg) and plateaued just a bit, but I’m pretty confident it will continue to come off as I keto on. Not worried about that.
Yesterday, I had a bit more physical activity in a fairly warm environment that caused me to sweat quite a bit more than normal. No problem, at least not at the time. Felt fine.
But I woke up early this morning, after about maybe 5 hours of sleep, and noticed that my heart rate was a little higher than I would have expected, maybe in the upper 80’s or so. Had I just had a nightmare, maybe that would make sense, but just sleeping, I thought that was a little high.
I had taken some magnesium before I went to bed as that sometimes helps me to sleep a little better. (It’s a powder we put into water.) But I didn’t take anything else. So when I woke up, I wondered to myself whether a little potassium would help calm the heart rate. I was awake anyway so I got up and had maybe a quarter teaspoon of “Lite-Salt”, I think it’s called (partly potassium chloride), a little water to wash it down, and went back to bed.
It wasn’t but just a few minutes later that my heart rate had dropped down into the 50’s or 60’s, which seemed a whole lot more normal.
I wondered, is that kinda what happens when the electrolytes get out of balance? I probably lost somewhere between a pint and a quart of fluids in sweat. And with sweat being kinda salty, and also giving me quite a whiff of that “ketone smell”, and knowing that a person’s dietary requirement for salt can increase in ketosis, it was something I wondered about.
Am I on the right track with my thinking?