Too Much Salt

Have you ever noticed nights after you eat mexican, chinese, or anything else high in sodium the way it makes you feel?  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night feeling hot, like my skin is tight, and I'm really thirsty.  Well since I've been changing the way I eat, I haven't felt like this at all.  I have completely taken added salt out of my diet.  I also watch the content of sodium in the things that I use that are already prepared for me.  

Well... yesterday was a half-cheat day.  My in-laws were here for the day and I knew we would be eating lunch and dinner out.  I have only had a few cheat days since I started and it had been several weeks.  So I decided yesterday I would have a few exceptions.  We ate lunch at Baja Burrito and dinner at Olive Garden.  These are two of my favorite restaurants.  At Baja for lunch I got a wheat burrito with chicken, beans, rice, lettuce, pico, salsa, cucumbers.  I didn't get the cheese or sour cream, but I knew that it would have a lot of salt and butter in the rice, chicken, and beans.  Hoping to counterbalance the sodium, I had several glasses of water with my meal.  At Olive Garden for dinner I got the Venetian Apricot Chicken.  I had looked it up online beforehand and new it was a sensible choice.  It had grilled chicken (I asked for the apricot sauce on the side) broccoli, and asparagus.  But once again I knew the food was all prepared with salt and butter (the customary way of food preparation in our culture). So once again I had several glasses of water to drink with the meal.  Well all this to say I woke up in the middle of the night feeling awful.  I was burning up.  My hands and feet were swollen.  I felt so thirty.  It took me a while to go back to sleep.  This morning wasn't much better.  It also made the morning run much harder.  I'm thinking goodness is salt really that bad.  It makes me feel miserable.  It definitely was not worth it.  I don't say all this to make people feel guilty about eating out or even eating salt.  More just to be conscious of what salt does to your body and the amount of it you take in.  It's very obvious that with my body it makes me retain large amounts of water which makes me very uncomfortable.  That also makes me wonder what it's doing to my body that is harmful.