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So, reading the Phinney/Volck book last night they talked about how utterly important it is to get 5g of sodium a day on a low carb, ketogenic diet. All those flu-like symptoms are because your body is excreting sodium like crazy, then it has to TEAR down muscle in order to balance things out with potassium.

It sounds like it might be the reason behind the constipation too. Kind of makes sense. You're probably losing water from your bowels as well as everywhere else.

The bummer is that if you do a LC diet right and get ample sodium to replace what you lose, you won't have that amazing loss the first two weeks because... yes, it is a great deal of water.

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Have you found any downfalls or negative aspects to low carb dieting?
Not if you do it right. By right I mean following a well-formulated low carbohydrate diet. Individuals on
low carb diets often do not have enough sodium in their diets. Keto adapted kidneys excrete more
sodium. In an effort to retain sodium, the body will then excrete potassium which can affect muscle protein balance negatively. This disturbed mineral management can also affect magnesium balance.
Suboptimal magnesium levels in cells are linked with muscle twitches and cramps. Thus if one is not
careful in ensuring adequate sodium intake this can cause problems in mineral balance in the body.
It is critical to have a properly formulated strategy for low carb dieting, especially long term. Depending
on individual goals, factors that need to be emphasized are moderate levels of protein, additional
sodium, and emphasis on the right types of fat for fuel (monounsaturates and saturates).

Pardon the yucky formatting, it came from a PDF. The book has a longer description.

Another site with this info:

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Myth #9: Low carb diets cause muscle wasting.

Not true. In fact, low carb diets are better at preserving and even increasing lean muscle mass. In this study published in 1984, a team of scientists from MIT and Harvard studied two groups of overweight women. They put one group on a low carb diet, and the other group on a high carb diet. Each diet allowed 700 calories per day. Even with a severe caloric deficit, the greater percentage of protein consumed on the low carb diet and the effects of ketosis resulted in a greater retention of muscle mass for the subjects on the low carb diet. In other words, the subjects on the high carb diet loss more muscle mass because the carbs they were eating displaced some of the protein that would have helped them retain muscle mass.

This phenomenon of how dietary protein helps the body retain muscle mass has been shown many times over in various studies on very low calorie diets which include adequate protein and muscle building substrates such as sodium and potassium. See this study, this study, and this study.

This general "muscle wasting" assertion often comes from trainers and dietitians who really have not studied the science on muscle preservation. They will tell you that the brain requires at least 100 grams of carb per day and if you don't get those carbs in the diet, your body will break down your muscles to get it. This is true when one's diet is high carb, and no ketone bodies are available as an alternative source of brain fuel.

But for a person who is adapted to a low carb, ketogenic diet, ketosis provides fuel in the form of ketone bodies for the brain, and the requirement for glucose drops to only about 40 grams per day. The body can easily make this amount from dietary protein and glycerol from the break down of fatty acids.

http://www.ketogenic-diet-resource....rb-dieting.html

Here's another good reference: http://jonnybowdenblog.com/salt-and-the-low-carb-diet/

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Ignore this lesson and you are likely to suffer the completely avoidable problems of headache, fatigue, weakness and constipation—maladies that any Inuit healer would have promptly resolved by giving you a bowl of blood soup, or meat broth made with sea ice of the proper age.