Renal Diet HQ Podcast 052 – 4 Things For People New To Kidney Disease

4 Things For People Who Are New To Kidney Disease

Podcast #52 Released on August 1, 2017

Welcome to the Renal Diet Headquarters podcast with your host, Mathea Ford, CEO of Renal Diet Headquarters. This is our weekly talk about how you can succeed with the kidney diet brought to you by renaldiethq.com, a website whose mission is to be the most valued resource on kidney disease that people can use to improve their health.

Hey guys, this is Mathea Ford with Renal Diet HQ, and I'm doing a challenge this month. It's to go live every day in August, so you should expect to see 30 or 31 new videos in the group in the page in the month of August. And today I wanted to take just a quick minute. I get a lot of questions from people who are brand new with kidney disease or people whose family members just found out that they have kidney disease and they want to help. And so I have some quick tips that are both related to diet and related to other stuff.

So, I want to go over those with you today quick and just make this a short live and comment below, add any questions that you have and I'll come back and answer those questions for you, whatever you have and maybe do another live about that topic if you let me know what you'd like to hear more about. I have some topics already chosen, but I love suggestions because I always want to tell you about things that you're interested in. My four tips for people who are new to kidney disease, who just got it or just found out or just deciding to do something about it.

Number one, first tip is regarding the diet. Cut your meat portion in half, fish, chicken, turkey, beef, whatever it is the amount that you normally eat, cut that in half. Now you may be thinking, well, i'll be hungry. I won't have enough to eat, that's not enough protein. Part of kidney disease is lowering your protein intake because protein creates a lot of waste in your body that your kidneys have to deal with. So, we actually only need about half the protein that we eat a day, so cutting it in half isn't going to hurt you.

And second of all, it also reduces those other things, like the amount of salt that you eat, the amount of potassium and phosphorous that you eat. So, the simple act of cutting the amount of meat you have that you normally eat in half can make a huge difference in your diet. So, I would just say, start with that. Don't worry about making special changes. If you're stage three kidney disease, this will help you and the other thing you do kind of with that because like you said, you may be hungry is add more vegetables.

Vegetables are a low cal way to add more volume to your diet and more nutrition without adding a lot of more calories. So, I would recommend you double the amount of vegetables that you eat whether it's just adding a salad, adding more carrots, cauliflower, peppers, whatever. So, next you're going to say to me, which I'll talk about in another video. I can't have tomatoes. I can't have this. I can't have potatoes. All of that is related to your personal labs. But the fact that you cut your protein in half, your protein serving in half is going to make a huge difference in your lab.

So you may not even need to be so worried about restrictive, but if you're worried about it, don't eat those vegetables. But there's plenty of vegetables that you can eat. And if you go to my website, renaldiethq.com, you can sign up and get seven free dinner meals, and you will look at the portions on those and realize that the portions are about half on the protein items. So, that's my number one tip is to reduce the amount of protein that you're eating by cutting your meat in half.

So, if you normally eat cheese kind of as your protein, cut the amount of cheese that you eat in half, and that will make a huge difference. So my second tip, the number two thing, let me look at my notes. Cut out the salt shaker. So, whether you have heart disease or not, you need to reduce your blood pressure. And a great way to do that is by cutting out the salt shaker. So just don't even have a salt shaker on your table. Use different herbs and spices.

Try to cook with less salt. Think about whether the salt is needed in that recipe when you're making it. Salt is needed in something like bread in a small amount because it helps with the chemical reaction. But your corn that you have on your plate doesn't need salt. It just needs maybe some flavor. So, add some different things like lemon pepper or other flavors, not salt. It will take a little bit to get used to that, but it's something that you will be doing for a long time.

So, helping that will help all of your labs and all of these things I'm telling you to do will slow down the progression of your kidney disease.

So, number three is to drink twice as much water. So, if you're already drinking water all day long and you drink eight cups of water a day, I would say maybe increase it by 25%. But for most people, we're drinking tea, we're drinking soda, we're drinking coffee, change out all of that, double your amount of water. So if you now drink one glass of water a day, drink two instead and switch out one of those beverages for water. So, what I like to do to start this is to say, okay with my evening meal, maybe I normally drink diet coke.

I'll switch out that for water, and then a couple of days later, I'll switch out one of my mid morning beverages ford water, until kind of every other beverage is water and then moving towards drinking mostly water. Now you may be asking, Why do you want me to drink mostly water? Why can't I drink tea and coffee? I never said you couldn't, but the more fluid that you go through your body helps to cleanse those kidneys to get those impurities out. And since your kidneys are still working, you're new to kidney disease.

You want to help them to flush that out easier. So, as you increase your water, the thing about coffee and tea and diet coke and diet soda is that they all have additional things for your body to have to manage. Water by itself, it just ends up diluting things and helping them float through a little easier. It also helps with any sort of constipation that you might have. Drinking more water helps to lubricate your bowels. So, drink double the water. If you normally drink 8 glasses of water, like I said, you don't have to necessarily double, but unless you're on dialysis, you don't have a fluid restriction.

So, go ahead and increase that fluid, and that will help your body to get more fluid and help your kidneys to work a little better. So the last thing I want to tell you that's not necessarily related to a diet is to check your medications. So, if you're new to kidney disease and you just found out you have stage three, one of the things you want to do is stop taking Ibuprofen.

Ibuprofen is significantly affecting your kidneys. So, you want to use Tylenol or other medications, or you want to reduce the amount of medication that you're taking. You want to ask your doctor, does this medication affect my kidneys? The other medication that significantly affects your kidneys if you're diabetic is Metformin. So, if you're on Metformin, don't stop taking it. I'm not telling you to do that, but go ahead and talk to your doctor and see if there's another medication that you can switch out. My mom recently did this, and basically her kidney disease went back to stage two because the Metformin was not affecting her kidneys anymore.

This won't change for everybody and it's truly something you need to just discuss with your doctor. But you do need to know, does this medication affect my kidneys? So when you're talking to them and they're giving you a new prescription, for an antibiotic or whatever, just ask them, does this affect my kidneys? That's something that every doctor that you have needs to be aware of, and they may not remember that because not all their patients have kidney disease. So, go ahead and make a comment below.

Let me know what else you'd like me to talk about. Let me know your questions regarding what I talked about. I don't think it's too controversial, but it should be something that you need to know. So, if you're starting right away, that's what I want you to know to go ahead and do. So have a great day. Go to renaldiethq.com and sign up for the email list. At the top, it says free seven day meal plan. Sign up there and it will get you to or you can click on the side or at the top of renaldiethq.com.

There's four tabs and one says, I have just found out a kidney disease. One says, I have kidney disease and diabetes. One says, I have dialysis and one says, I just need more information. Pick which one of those affects you and sign up for the email list and that will get you where you need to go started with a diet. So, have a great day and I look forward to talking to you more this month and answering more of your questions. So, comment below and let me know what you want to know.

Thanks. Bye bye.

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