Especially if you have a chronic health condition, your diet impacts your life in a big way. When you are diagnosed, for example with renal disease, your doctor’s recommendation will almost always be to change your diet. A healthy diet is a huge part of the healthy lifestyle you need to maintain the best wellness and treat your condition.
You Feel What You Eat
Chronic kidney disease is especially impacted by diet in huge way. This is because everything you ingest is eventually passed through your kidneys.
The kidneys act like a filtration system for your entire body. After your food is digested, the byproducts of everything are passed into your bloodstream and through your kidneys. Once they are filtered through the kidneys, some byproducts are sent to other parts of the body and any excess is eliminated through your urine.
When the kidneys are not functioning, these byproducts can build up and cause a host of very uncomfortable and potentially dangerous side effects. Keeping in mind that every single thing you eat or drink gets filtered through your kidneys may help your understanding about why diet is especially important for chronic kidney disease.
Sticking To Your Diet
Even when it is your very health at stake, it can sometimes be very difficult to keep up with a diet. Sometimes you may be tempted by the foods that you are used to eating, however unhealthy. It is important to remember how much is at stake. What you can do for this is remember this one fact: you have the potential to slow or even stop the progression of kidney failure, thus avoiding end stage renal disease and dialysis. You can only accomplish this through the correct diet and treatment.
Making things as simple as possible will help you be successful on your new healthy diet and lifestyle. Whatever you can do to simplify your life will be very worth it in the long run. For example, do not choose the most complicated recipes when starting a new diet.
Meal planning may help you stick to your diet. Meal planning not only helps you put together healthy meals ahead of time, but it makes it so that your day is planned. This makes it less likely that you will make poor decisions at a vending machine or fast food counter.
Meal planning starts with research and deciding on what recipes or meals you will eat. Make a list of ingredients and then head to the grocery store to buy everything you will need for the week or up to two weeks at a time. Then do whatever prep work, such as chopping up ingredients, ahead of time to make each day as easy as possible. Make sure to account for all meals and snacks.
Dieting certainly isn’t the easiest thing to do, but it is super important when you have a chronic health condition. Chronic kidney disease is greatly related to your diet and is strongly affected by it. To maintain your best health and help your disease, you will need to understand how important diet is and work hard to keep it up. For more information on CKD, click here.
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