I would suggest that you have some potassium gluconate at hand. The dropping of potassium is directly related to getting active b12 folate levels up. The severity will vary depending upon how deplete you were. It also depends upon how much potassium you already have in your diet and also how much sodium.
I am lucky in a way that I have a recognisable symptom of heart palpitations so I know when my potassium is low. For the first few months I monitored my symptoms and adjusted my dose of potassium. I ended up with 3x 200mg potassium gluconate spread across the day (first thing in the morning, lunchtime and before bed). I know that I still need this every day since I get mild symptoms after getting up out of bed.
In answer to your question no there is no loading before taking b12 but you need to take an appropriate dose while you take it if there isn't enough in your normal diet. We use a lot of potassium in the body in conjunction with sodium for all our cells so this needs to be replenished every day.
@arewenearlythereyet
Hi,
Any objection to potassium chloride? I use the bottles of Now powder.
The 99mg per tablet/ capsule thing is an American law that says anything higher than 99mgs is dangerous and could lead to hyperkalaemia - utter rot when you know that their Nu-Salt and Lo-Salt products contain (from memory) around 600mg per serving, and anyway, it's reducing or cutting out sodium that causes the majority of cardiac events via hyperkalaemia (the human body doesn't register a tual quantities of nutrients, hormones, etc, it only registers RELATIVE imbalances, so even with a tiny amount of potassium going in, if there's no sodium to balance it out, you could still suffer arrhythmias or worse.)
The no or low salt recommendation is, IMHO, one of the most damaging recommendations made by modern medicine in the last 25 or so years. That and the low/ no fat one. You need cholesterol for cells and hormones.
As you say, the RDA for potassium is c.4700mg a day, and it's plentiful in foods. If it was potentially dangerous to us, logically it wouldn't be so abundant in such a wide range of foods.
The reason potassium is so rapidly depleted when methylation blocks start to lift and new cells start to be made is that new cells are very potassium-hungry. They can't mature without it.
The balance between sodium and potassium is absolutely critical to human health. If you want salt, or crave salt, it's your body telling you it needs it to maintain that balance. My poor adrenal function means I kick out more sodium than is healthy for me, and before my adrenals were treated with hydrocortisone, I regularly used to eat salt neat. About 2-3 teaspoonsful at a time.
Even though my sodium levels remain on the very low end of normal, I still take c.600mg potassium chloride every day, sometimes twice a day, depending on what my body is telling me. Sometimes I want extra salt on my food, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I want extra potassium, sometimes I don't. It's all very fluid, based on what my body is telling me.
Unless you eat a diet that is exclusively made up of unprocessed, unpackaged and organic foods and drinks, you will get significant quantities of unseen sodium in your foods etc. Check your labels.
Low potassium does indeed make you feel like rubbish. Very tired, floppy, weak, moody, miserable and depressed. If you're on any loop-diuretics, like Frusemide (I think it's called Furosemide these days), you definitely need extra potassium, because loop-diuretics make the kidneys kick out large amounts of it. Other diruetics like spironolactone do not do that. I've been through this myself (see my intro post).
Blood tests almost never accurately reflect what is getting into the cells, because they can only show what's sitting in your bloodstream and not your tissue and organ cells. Blood is just a transporter. The nutrients still have to be effectively delivered from the bloodstream and into the cells to be of any use.
It's like looking at motorway traffic and service stations, with the traffic, drivers and passengers being the nutrient carriers and nutrients, the motorways being your veins, and the services being your cells. Doesn't matter how heavy the traffic is, if it isn't leaving the motorway and entering the service stations, your nutrients aren't being delivered. Traffic has to pull off the motorway and enter the services to do any good. More than that, the people in the vehicles have to get out of their cars, trucks, vans, lorries, etc, and actually go inside the services themselves.
With many of us having receptor difficulties, meaning in this analogy that the traffic is pulling into the services but no-one is getting out of the cars and going inside the buildings, or that the service station doors are locked and no-one can get in, high bloodtest values can give an extremely misleading picture of what appears to be excessively high levels of nutrients that we are actually functionally deficient in.
Low bloodtest values always make me think there isn't enough traffic on my motorways, and I interpret that as being unarguably deficient. My cells' demands are obviously higher than my nutrient traffic when I get a low, low-normal result back. Not even the NHS can disagree with that
It's unfortunate that the NHS doesn't do a fully comprehensive range of nutrient testing anymore. I get my potassium, sodium, magnesium, D3, calcium, iron, folate and B12 checked often enough (I take D3 and they all panicked that I'd go D toxic on it, but after two years of monthly testing, they finally conceded that my K2 was indeed stopping excess calcium from collecting in my blood, and had also reversed my osteoporosis by the same mechanism, so they eventually gave up sticking needles in me every for weeks), but there are no other B vit tests or other nutrient tests that I've been able to get done. I can't afford a private panel.