Life is Good
Life is good. We are home. Bradyn is happy. Did I say life is good?
Bradyns’ nephrologist (Dr. Kidney), wants him eating super healthy from now on. Not only do we need to get him healthy for the surgery, we also need to start teaching him how important it is to eat healthy for the rest of his life. He has some pretty significant damage to his left kidney from all of this and the better he feeds his body, the healthier his kidneys will be and the longer they will last him.
We have been eating healthier for quite some time now. It has been a staggered approach. About two years ago I decided it was time to get serious about losing the baby weight so the food in a bag and food in a box stuff got kicked out of the house and then a few months ago, his neurologist (Dr. Brain) started talking to me about brain food and how important it is for children with Epilepsy (all children really) to manage their nutrition and give their body and their brain the best food possible. We have been slowly getting rid of processed foods and high fructose corn syrup and the like for months now. But, Dr Kidney is not interested in hearing about how we are working on getting healthier. Her exact quote was “This child is not to have a morsel of junk food. He needs whole foods, no preservatives, nothing processed, if your great grandma didn’t know what it was, it shouldn’t be going into his body.” I smiled and nodded and didn’t say anything but thought “We are half way there, we can do this. It will be easy.”
So today I cleaned out the cabinets. All the crap food has left the building. The Oreos are gone. The potato chips are gone. The yogurt. The one that Bradyn loves. The one with all of the high fructose corn syrup. The one I have been telling myself is actually kinda good for him cuz it has the live cultures in it. Yeah, that one. Gone. Then I headed to the store. And that’s where I realized that eating healthier is very, very different that upending your diet completely and going 100% whole foods.
I can still do this but I no longer think it’s going to be easy. I am going to need to do some research. I am going to buy a juicer. I am going to need your help. Have you been through this already? Send me advice. Send me recipes!
For today I just hung out on the outside aisles of the big box. I spent a long time in the yogurt area. I was looking for no fat, no sugar added yogurt with live cultures. It took FOREVER. I finally found one. ONE! That met my needs. I bought a ton of fresh fruit and veggies (the entire time thinking about chemicals and pesticides, wondering how many chemicals I am exposing his damaged kidney to in this one trip to the store).
When I got home I got out the blender and threw in:
A big spoonful of the plain sugar-free yogurt
A few strawberries
A few pieces of pineapple
A little pour of apple juice
Some ice
And……. HE LOVED IT! I am now back to feeling like I can do this!
Seriously – if you have advice or recipes, send em this way! PLEASE!
Photo Credit: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
4 Responses to “Life is Good”
Good for you! It’s something you have to work on every day and there’s a lot out there (restaurant menus, cheap prices) to sabotage things.
Do you guys have a Trader Joe’s yet? They are a great source for good stuff.
I have gall stones so I was really trying the low fat thing for a while (need to get back to it.)
So, fruit smoothies are great. I used to make them all the time. You can buy bags of frozen fruit which is great because a) it lasts longer than fresh and b) the frozen aspect adds the icey bits that makes smoothies good. Frozen fruit is pretty sweet on its own, but you can add some OJ or honey to sweeten it up while you work your way off sugary tastes. I get bags of raspberries, strawberries, blackberries (sometimes they sell mixed berry bags), pineapple, mango, and peaches. A fresh banana blended in is great.
Fage greek yogurt is a really good brand that you can add to smoothies, or they sell it with little side packets of honey or fruit. Not sweetened but very good with granola and fresh fruit (I’ll take you guys to a place with amazing fruit/yogurt/granola bowls when you visit.)
Another thing I did was make my own vegetable stock. Just a bunch of veggetables thrown into a pot and boiled for an hour. I froze it (in bags and ice cube trays) and made vegetable soup and used it for seasoning quinoa when I made stuffed zucchini. It’s good to give flavor to things you sautee or boil. The vegetable soup is a good one for low fat, healthy and cheap. Throw in vegetables that you guys like and meatballs (organic meat or vegetarian “meatballs”) and noodles and it’s good, filling and makes good leftovers. We can talk about ingredients.
So, that’s a start for my advice. We’ll talk. I love you! :)
Okay, so all the cute Swedish candy is going in the bin, I guess I can send the organic moose-shaped pasta though. You may want to try the cookbook “whole foods for the whole family” Also, even good ol’ Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks are great. I’ve learned to cook all over again, because a lot of the ingredients we have at home, I had to make. So, I loved, “Jamie’s Dinners” and Jamie’s “Ministry of Food” for easy recipes that are kid friendly. For a real splurge go with Jamie at Home and he talks about easy/cool ways to plant fruits and vegs. It is very inspirational. I must say, I do breathe a sigh of relief when I read about all the horrible things that are being discovered about high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils. Food here just doesn’t have it. What I miss is the frozen organic stuff – like Laura mentions. Molly grew up on the frozen sweet potato cubes that were organic. If you google Carrabbas vegetable soup recipe, there’s a great freezable recipe that you can adapt. My kids like it. I also have a tortilla soup recipe that can be made almost instantaneously and I make my own spaghetti sauce and avoid the sugar that’s in most of the commercial brands and bypass the expensive organic kinds. More later. But hugs coming your way!
Oh, is there a special reason he’s on low-fat? I’ve read that normal weight kids can have full fat dairy products. Maybe that’s a Sweden thing.
Laura – Nope ;( no Trader Joes yet. I was thinking about that wonderful place on my trip to the store. It would be a lot easier to make these lifestyle changes if we lived in California! Thanks for the great advice!
Hey Heather – we haven’t sat down and gone over the nutrition plan from the doctor yet. So the low-fat part was me assuming lower fat his better. They diagnosed failure to thrive as a symptom of everything else. So who knows, she may tell me to increase his fat consumption…. This shopping trip was 1st attempt, I will get more knowledgeable as time goes on.