Hello Everyone,

I've been on and off low carb for a while now and I think one of the reasons its hard for me to stick to is because every morning, I wake up feeling like death. Like I've been up drinking all night and have a bad hangover or something. This is without drinking. Now I've been on the diet for a while this last time and I wake up feeling really dehydrated and just drained even if I drink a ton of water before bed. After I wake up and get going, I feel fine and I feel great the rest of the day. I know it's not the low carb flu which I've heard people get and I've read up on that. Anyone else get this issue or has found a remedy. Any suggestions? I would appreciate the help. I really like low carb but waking up feeling like I'm hungover every morning gets to me after a while.

Hi, Tacomaguy. Just for starters, would you mind posting a typical day's menu? LC can be dehydrating by definition, but it sounds like you are taking in enough water. In fact, perhaps too much water is diluting your electrolytes. So another thing might be, are you getting enough salt? Other minerals like potassium and magnesium? Your tissues have to retain the water you take in.

I don't claim to know a lot about these things, but if we bump your thread, perhaps some other folks will chime in.

Meanwhile, try drinking a cup of bouillon close to bedtime.

Best wishes.

Have you ever had sleep apnea?

In the morning I usually stop off at quiktrip and get a breakfast sausage and coffee. I eat the sausage plain. Lunchtime I usually eat a couple of pieces of baked or rotisserie chicken with skin or a burger with no bread. When I get home I might snack on a couple pieces of bacon or something like that. For dinner I normally eat chicken wings, pork chops or steak with maybe some broccoli and butter. Also, I do have minor sleep apnea but I don't know if that's a factor as I don't get the effect when I'm eating carbs. I just feel really drained in the morning like I'm dehydrated. I tried the bullion thing once but couldn't notice much difference. I would imagine what I'm eating has plenty of salt though. I don't get the pitting adema that's mentioned when people are dehydrated. I also notice that I never register on the ketone sticks in the morning... like my body has used up the fuel overnight and is running on empty. That's kind of how it feels as well.

Do you have any idea what your blood sugar is when you wake up?

How long is "ON"? It does take a while to adapt. I used to do a version of a low carb 'fad' diet that was 12 days on 2 days off. I was constantly flipping in and out of ketosis -- never fully adapting. It made me feel like death warmed over. Eventually I could not take it anymore and stayed "OFF" .

I'm doing LC right this time -- no more cheat days. Even months into the diet I still had times when I felt crappy - usually when a 'whoosh' was under way and typically it would happen in the AM. Getting some salt (drinking a 1/4 tsp salt in warm water) always did the trick.

No idea unfortunately. As far as how long I've been on the diet, it's gotta be about a month or longer being very strict.

I wanted to give an update on an old post just in case it helps others in a similar situation.

So since last time, because I was having this issue with low carb, I decided to try out Paleo for a while and that helped with the waking up issue but not so much the weight loss. I restarted again recently and I think bkloots was completely right in the original answer.

When I first posted this question, I had tried the bullion thing for more salt intake and I was eating avocados for the potassium and I took a multivitamin for supplement as well. It didn't seem to help at that time. However, this time, I bought and started taking magnesium supplements in addition to the multivitamin and I think that's what it was. I thought the magnesium in the multivitamin should have been good enough but it wasn't for me or I was just using a multivitamin that wasn't cutting it. Either way I feel a lot better this time around and maybe I can keep the weight off this time.

Check out the salt thread in my signature.

Most multi vitamins use a poorly absorbable form of magnesium, magnesium oxide. I got caught on this issue too.

Now I take magnesium malate, magnesium taurate (my favorite), or magnesium glcyinate.

You can also make your own magnesium bicarbonate. http://www.afibbers.org/Wallerwater.pdf