I don’t know how it happened, but yesterday, I only ate 846 calories.  I’ve been tracking every single thing I eat in the FoodFeed, but it’s not until the end of the day that I sit down and plug it all into SparkPeople.

I love SparkPeople.  If you’re looking for a way to track your diet, it’s the best free one out there.  I use it to track nutrition and workouts every single day.  However, when I scroll down to the bottom of my nutrition page, I see a box like this one:

Potassium


HOW AM I LACKING THAT MUCH POTASSIUM?  I ate two bananas that day! What the hell is potassium, anyway?

If I’m understanding Wikipedia correctly, potassium is the stuff that keeps our cells from absorbing too much salt, and not eating enough foods with potassium can increase your risk for high blood pressure.  Apparently I’m not alone in low K consumption, as most people in the United States only get half the recommended necessary potassium.

In the pursuit of higher potassium, I went to the drug store last night to look for some potassium supplements, but it turns out that you can only get them in doses of 99mg, or 3% of the recommended amount.  The vitamin bottle says not to take more than one a day, so it’s not as easy as just eating 20 potassium tablets to balance out a deficiency.  I decided that buying a separate bottle wasn’t worth it, and switched from One-a-Day Women’s (which has no potassium) to One-a-Day Weight Smart Advanced (which has 99mg).

So how in the world do I make up the other 2,000mg of missing potassium in my diet? It turns out that there are a ton of foods that are high in potassium that don’t really seem to have any correlation to each other.  Apricots, peas, baked potatoes, veal, tomato paste and sunflower seeds are some of them.  There’s also a salt substitute which uses potassium as its main ingredient, and 1/4 a teaspoon is 10% of your daily recommended intake, more than the amount in my vitamins. I might have to give that a try!

All in all, 4,500mg a day may not have been as elusive as I originally thought.  You win this time, potassium.  This time.