Hi, I'm Ryan.

Woke up Monday November 5th with 0 strength, I'm talking paralyzed 90-95%. Managed to get to edge of bed and fell out. I literally couldn't move. Took 6 firefighters to get me off floor. I have muscle strength back now after a ton of potassium orally and via IV, my potassium level was 2.2 and normal is like 4.4, my heart should have stopped beating. Kept me all day Monday and until about 5pm Tuesday, wasn't allowed to get up at all. They took blood 17 times and want me to come back for more over the following weeks "profound weakness with severe hypokalemia suspected due to hypokalemic periodic paralysis". Well that's some rare genetic mutation that just didn't fit considering it presents itself in childhood usually and not when you are 27 years old... people with it also experience attacks weekly, if not every single day.

So, I went and got myself my first primary care physician as a doctor. Unlike the hospital that just took blood sample after blood sample after blood sample, she spent a solid 3 hours in the examination room with me asking me question after question and looking over the bulk of my body. She decided it was actually my sodium intake, especially in the 2 days leading up to the event.

Ryan got a Striiv last week and has been striving to do 10k steps a day (since he sits at a desk 10-16 hours a day for income) as well as getting back to the gym, a place he used to be at regularly years ago until his training partner moved from Indianapolis to San Francisco leaving him with no motivation whatsoever to go to the gym.

Not sure paleo is right for me (I have a lot of issues with vegetables... textures mostly trigger my gag reflex... I can manage tomatoes, jalapenos and potatoes, carrots if they are boiled and very soft but I'm working on it trying to force myself to get past the gag factor on some others) but it fits my meat intake just not my plant intake so here I am!

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The benefits of reduced sodium chloride consumption have long been accepted, but some experts say this should be taken with a grain of, well, salt. Mark Whittaker meets those shaking up accepted medical thought.
Any diabetic with high blood pressure who walks into George Jerums' Melbourne clinic will get the standard advice: if their salt intake is high, they should halve it. This is despite the fact that when Professor Jerums and his former PhD student, Dr Elif Ekinci, studied the salt intake of 638 elderly type-2 diabetics who went through his clinic at Heidelberg's Austin Health, they found that those who ate less salt were significantly more likely to die.
What we found was the people with the lowest sodium intake had the worst cardiovascular outcomes. 

After 10 years, it emerged that for every extra 2.3 grams of sodium (equal to about a teaspoon of salt) in their urine over a day, their risk of dying fell by 28 per cent. Even though those who ate more salt tended to be fatter, fewer died from "all causes" and, contrary to what we've been told about the dangers of salt to the heart, fewer died from heart disease and stroke.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/salt-wars-20121126-2a25t.html#ixzz2EKdxDfeM

Heh that's nice and all, until you wake up 95% paralyzed for several hours because of super excessive sodium intake resulting in your heart nearly stopping at a moderate case of PTSD.

Was it too much salt, or not enough potassium salt?  Maybe you should switch to sea salt or even "lite" salt to get more potassium.

If you don't want to eat vegetables on paleo, you don't have to.  Some people eat only meat.  A lot eat only green leafy vegetables; in fact, while carrots are paleo, potatoes, being tubers, are not.

No one knows for certain, but it's likely too much sodium as I'd regularly have 10k mg a day or more, and in the days leading up to it I'd have between 30k and 50k mg a day.