Eating can seem like a challenge when you have health related dietary restrictions to consider. Your diet truly affects so much of your overall health when you are living with a chronic health condition such as chronic kidney disease. You need to do whatever you can to stick to your prescribed diet plan. Putting together weekly meal plans can make your life a lot easier.
How a Meal Plan Can Help You
Meal plans are a truly useful tool for any diet, especially when you are following a particular diet for chronic health conditions. With chronic kidney disease, you have to cut out certain things such as sodium, potassium, and possibly even excess fluids from your diet. Meal planning can make this much easier.
Meal planning takes out the guess work of your everyday eating schedule. Instead of just making choices as they come, you can plan your meals in advance so you don’t have to worry about the day to day decision making. This not only makes your day easier, it also helps ensure that you are making the best decisions possible. After all, if you know what you are going to eat and have it prepared already, you are a lot less likely to make poor decisions.
Getting Started
Start your meal plan by choosing your favorite kidney friendly recipes that you want to use for the week. You may need to do some research to find healthy recipes that fit into your diet plan. Be careful not to choose any recipes that are very difficult, at least not at first. Keep everything as simple as possible.
Once you have chosen your recipes and decided what you want to eat for each meal (and snacks) for the week, make a list and do all of your grocery shopping ahead of time. Then prep as much of your meals possible so that you will have the smallest amount of work to do each day to follow through with your meal plan. Chop veggies, measure and separate out ingredients, cook ahead of time, and pack lunches to make your life easy.
Base Ideas
To make your meal plan for breakfast and lunches on the go even easier, try using a base food for the week, and changing it up as you go. For example, you could have an omelet every day for breakfast but change it up so you have something new and exciting each day. Simply change up your kidney friendly ingredients to make a different type of omelet each day, and add something different, such as an English muffin, toast, or piece of fruit to keep it fresh.
Weekly meal planning is the best and easiest way to eating with chronic kidney disease as easy as possible. You will no longer have to spend time worrying about what you will eat during the day, because it is already planned out for you. Meal planning makes eating with chronic kidney disease so much easier. Plus, you’ll be able to live healthier and happier with just a little thought and planning. Click here for more information on chronic kidney disease.
Also published on Medium.
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