Good Morning! Hey! It's Mathea Ford, Registered Dietitian and creator of the Love Your Kidneys Delicious Meal Planning for CKD course.
Happy Saturday! It is Saturday morning before Superbowl Sunday I hope you've got some delicious food planned for that and you're going to have an enjoyable time. If you don't enjoy football, at least I hope you enjoy the commercials right? That's my favorite. I love watching all the commercials and stuff.
This morning I want to talk about some what ifs in your future. Your future, my future, all of our future is not necessarily set in stone. It's something that we can change and I know some of the things that people talk to me about and tell me that they struggle with when it comes to being diagnosed with chronic kidney disease and trying to plan meals.
I know that there's a lot of issues that come up for people so I wanted to talk through those a little bit. If you're struggling with these things that I talked about, you're not alone. You are experiencing things that people feel. It's really overwhelming to think about the diet, to do something about it be very overwhelming because it is a complex diet that's made a lot of times more difficult by all the restrictions that may or may not need to have and all the information that's out there.
There maybe plenty of information that's out there on the internet about it but you don't necessarily know which information is the right thing to worry about or concern about. Most people are aware that it's a pretty major life event when you get diagnosed with chronic kidney disease and yet it seems like you get very little help. You get an informational sheet or you get help from Dr. Google but what do you do?
Like I talked about a couple days ago, unfortunately, initially, people start out with some pretty complicated restrictions that may be outdated information. All of a sudden, you feel like [tell me if this is you] you feel like you have to cook all your meals and you don't have all the time anymore. Like you didn't have two hours to prep and plan meals before you got diagnosed and now all of a sudden, you don't have those hours either.
You may have to cook meals for yourself or other people I know a lot of people my audience are women and one of the things a lot of times we as women do have to be responsible for cooking family's meals, planning family meals so that can make it even more difficult. You could eat healthier, can't we all? But you're not sure which changes you need to make. So, you have a list of Nos, things that you can't eat because will cause further damage and yet knowing what to eat is like evades you. It just doesn't seem like you know what to do. I hate it when somebody tells me I can't do something because that's the only thing I think about.
Where do you start with? Many times often when people get chronic kidney disease they will have other health-related conditions. You may have had PKD, you may have a low oxalate diet because you may have kidney stones, you may need gluten-free. All those things added into these restrictions are just making it even more complicated and you think to yourself I need to be a dietitian to figure this out. How do you eat anything at all now that you have all these restrictions? Putting together a meal is kind of a one at a time thing you can even think I had to think “oh! I need a whole plan.”
Let's go-to recipes. Like do you love finding recipes on the internet? I love finding recipes. I love using Pinterest for recipes. But when you have chronic kidney disease, all of a sudden, you need a little more information than maybe it is in that recipe. A lot of times recipes don't even provide nutrient values but all of a sudden you need to know,