Renal Diet Podcast 084: Healthy Eating On The Go With CKD

Podcast #84 Released on March 9, 2018
I want to talk to you because it’s hard enough to manage your diet and to watch what you’re eating when you have chronic kidney disease and you’re at home and you can make all your meals and you can control everything. But if you’re out and about doing things like going to your grandkids’ soccer games or traveling in your RV or doing whatever. There’s no need for it to slow you down.
There are things you can do to help improve your diet and I want to talk to you about those today. You are going to probably have to make some adjustments to your eating habits when you’re away from home. In order to stick with your diet, to know what you’re going to have to do is not as easy as just driving up to a drive-thru when you have some dietary restrictions. There are some things that you’re going to need to do so you don’t you know cause worse problems for your kidneys. A few tips and ideas just to get you through this it can be done with some planning.
Number one is to know your dietary restrictions. Do you have to limit salt? Do you have a list of limit potassium? Do you have to limit phosphorus? Do you have to limit protein? You have to limit fluid? All of those things are important to know and it’s also important to know the priority. If you’re a dialysis patient and you need to limit your fluid and that’s the number one priority that’s more important than worrying about you know how much protein or potassium or phosphorus. Talk to your doctor, talk to your nurse, talk to your dietitian about what one of those is the priority.
If you have to choose because sometimes you will have to choose you need to know like if there’s some No No foods out to eat, if there’s some foods that are absolutely no just because you can’t have enough control over them like if you are trying to watch your potassium and French fries. French fries are going to be salty and they’re fried and they have a lot of potassium and there’s no way you can control that so you may have to avoid those. Not saying you do. I’m just saying if you know there’s a food that you may have to avoid, please be aware of that ahead of time.
Plan for your outing so if you know you’re going to have a busy day, then you want to make sure that you kind of identified some things so you’re going to have something to eat maybe before you go out so that you’re not hungry and wanting to eat something. You’re going to identify where you could potentially get like a good snack food item that you can use to eat when you’re out. Is there a bar that you can eat? Is there a fruit? Maybe take a bag of strawberries or some blueberries with you those types of things to take along and to plan ahead keeps you from just grabbing whatever is available.
I know that a lot of times we have questions about what is going to be good for us and if we can take some of those along that’s good thing.
Along those same lines, choosing some healthy snacks that you can pack and take with you keep your bag or your little cooler or something packed with smart snacks like grapes and some maybe some nuts are okay that are unsalted that can kind of pulled you over so you don’t want to have to grab something out of the vending machine at the last minute.
Know what you’re putting in your mouth. You’re going to want to look at nutrition labels or read the label when you’re getting something; you’re going to want to ask questions if you’re at a restaurant. You’re going want to ask them how they prepare something.