Wednesday, September 04, 2013

No Salt, No Potassium, No Sugar, No Carbs, No Protien, What the heck?

I'm going to try to start sharing this restricted diet journey so that others who are having to change their whole culinary world may find a little help from our trial and error.

The Dad has fiddled around (barely paid any attention) with his diabetes to the point where he now has CKD (Chronic Kidney Disease) and is approaching stage 4 along with hyper-tension.  His doctor woke him up to the reality of his situation when the threat of dialysis came into his most recent evaluation of lab tests, so we are in a hard scrabble to make the necessary adjustments to his eating habits and it's really proving to be confusing and extremely difficult and I feel so bad that he has to give up all the foods he loves the most in order to extend his life a bit longer.  (Whew! talk about a run on sentence!)

We had been working on the diabetes at meal times, but he would eat out and sneak things that he wasn't supposed to have.  I'm happy to say, he has stopped that.  At least so far :)  He's actually trying to keep a log of what he eats during the day (well, he tells me and I write it down) but we are working together on it.  Sometimes I think it's harder on E.J.  He likes to cook with all kinds of stuff that are now on the cannot have list and we are all having to change our thinking and make the proper adjustments when cooking for him.

One thing that is helping us is that we fix the bland meal that the Dad can eat and then after he is fed, we doctor it up with the stuff to make it taste yummy.  So far, we've managed to make some interestingly edible (not exactly delicious but edible) substitutions to our dinner rotation.  Lunches are proving to be the real tricky meal of the day.

Plus, I'm so morbidly obese that it's really hard for anyone to take dietary advice from me.  It's gonna be that 'practice what you preach' kind of thing.  I don't have the same health concerns that he has, but my problems are mostly weight related and I should have been paying attention to my eating habits for many years now too.  NO MORE EXCUSES!!!!

We went to the nutrition class that Kaiser holds for kidney care, and he went to the diabetes class a few years back.  They have both been really helpful, but we have put in a request for a personal nutritionist to help us with meal planning.  Doing this on our own, with all the vague and inconsistent information we are gleaning from just about everywhere is not helping us much.  We have come up with some really good substitutions so far and I hope to share them here, however, the quest continues for better recipes and meal plans.

No comments: