MEGI RYCHLIKOVA reveals how a little salt put the vim back into her life.

DOCTORS and nurses tend to smile in approval when they ask me about my lifestyle. I take regular exercise, I like fruit and veg and don't touch tobacco, but do have the odd drink or two.

The smiles broaden when they take my blood pressure. The reading is always "nice and low".

But when I had it taken recently during a smear test, the reading prompted my husband, a student nurse, to say "that's very low". So I borrowed his anatomy and physiology textbook to find out where it fitted in the range of normal readings - and discovered it was off the bottom.

Not only that, for a week I had had the symptoms not of hypertension, which is too high blood pressure, but of hypotension, or too low blood pressure. They included light-headedness, nausea and extreme lethargy on waking up. I had put them all down to over tiredness, as I had felt like this before in the past.

So I read further and discovered that low blood pressure can be caused by shock (not in my case), internal bleeding (no), low blood volume caused by poor nutrition (no), or lack of water (mmm). I sometimes have mild headaches after drinking coffee, which is dehydrating. Maybe a glass of water would solve the problem.

I wasn't thirsty, but I drank a couple of mugfuls which went straight through me. My body obviously thought it had enough water. What was next?

Next on the list was lack of sodium. Without enough salt (which contains sodium) you can drink gallons of water and still be dehydrated because your body cannot absorb it.

Many years ago, I stopped sprinkling salt on my food because health experts advise that too much salt is bad for you. I even avoided using it in cooking, despite my husband's complaints.

I pulled the salt packet from the back of the cupboard and sprinkled some on my lunch hoping this was not the answer.

The salt was so nice it tasted sweet.

The next morning, I woke up bright-eyed and full of vim.

So now salt is always on the table, my husband is happy and I don't suffer from "tiredness".