Rick, the Linus Pauling website states that adults need 4,700mg of potassium a day...so your taking of the 1000mg that first day would seem OK...

Here is what may be at play as well: potassium concentration is much higher inside the cell than outside (I think it said 30 times higher), and sodium concentration is much higher outside the cell than inside (ten times). With our salty, sodium-rich Western diet, perhaps the problem is not so much an outright potassium deficiency, but an imbalance between the sodium-potassium relationship in and out of the cell. It has not been until this century that people began consuming the massive quantities of salt that we do (other than cured meats, but those were eaten sparingly, if you got them at all). So while we used to eat lots of foods rich in potassium and low in salt, now the opposite is true. And once one electrolyte gets off balance, it seems reasonable to assume other things get out of whack as well, like a dominoe effect.

It would be interesting to see how salt affects your new-found improvement with the potassium, eh?