Common Dietary Questions

Many of you lovely people have been asking for help about eating for CKD when you have other health issues that impose further restrictions.

Here is what you can do.

Have your food lists at the ready for CKD.

Then, find food lists for your other health issues showing you what you can eat.

Now, go through and highlight, on the CKD sheets, all the foods that are acceptable for your other conditions. If something conflicts, cross it off.

Then take note of the highlighted foods in all the lower nutrient columns on the CKD sheets.

These will be your most frequently used foods to work with.

The highlighted foods in the moderate columns are ones you can work with occasionally.

The ones highlighted in the high columns; you will want to work with sparingly.

Basically, you are going to weed out what you can or cannot use, then zoom in on the best options 

When you are ready to learn how to start incorporating more of the higher nutrient items, jump into the Pro course and learn how to add variety and flip recipes to fit your needs!

If you are looking for extensive food lists that cover everything from fruits and veggies, to leaveners, gums & binders, you will find them in the Basics Essentials (Basics) section of the online program, in Book One: The Basic Essentials, or you can get the individual units on the foods you need most.

What foods are good, and what foods are bad for kidney disease?

Here’s the thing, no food is “good” or “bad” for CKD. 

You only need to know how to balance the ingredients and understand how much you can use alone or in combinations.

There is such a huge variety of foods out there that can be used!

My point is, I don’t want you believing that you are trapped into only using certain foods, or you have to give up your favorites. 

You don’t.

You only need to learn how to work with them and I want to help you do that. 

Think of it like this... take all the ingredients for your meal, place them on a scale with your nutritional window showing. If there's too much potassium, remove something, if the phosphorus is low, replace that item you removed with something phosphorus-y. Drop the salt down, and make sure any other nutrients you must track fall right in your limits. You are simply removing, adding, or adjusting ingredients until you hit your window.

It may sound confusing or intimidating, or heck, like too much work, but I promise, if you are show how to do this, it becomes second nature.

You can enjoy foods, variety, and eating with CKD. 

You can easily set up your nutritional window and balance those ingredients, to assure you are eating the maximum nutrition and enjoying your favorite foods.

Isn’t that what you want too?

If you are ready for the crazy amount of variety you can have, then Let's get you eating great again. Start with the numerous, extensive, categorized food lists (Basics), then move into the Adapting instructions (Core / Pro, or Adapting mini course) so you know how to safely incorporate them. 

How do I make CKD eating work?

I am here to tell you that you can successfully and confidently eat for CKD if you have the right information and processes within your toolkit. 

Cos, without them, you will continue to spin circles.

I know firsthand. I have lived through it, I understand it, and that’s why I am begging you to stop spinning your wheels.

Successful CKD eating starts with having dependable resources to find accurate and reliable nutritional information. Yep, I realized right away that I couldn’t be certain we were within my hubby’s restrictions if I didn’t even know what nutrients were in the foods we were using.

Next, you need acceptable food lists that contain much more than just common ingredients.

You may also need more information if you have food allergens, other health issues, or if you are gluten free, lower carb, vegan, etc. You need to know what is in the foods you use and how much you can safely use. 

Then, you need to determine your base guideline meal and snack numbers so you know what recipes and/or ingredients are acceptable for you. 

Speaking of base guideline meal numbers, you know those days, especially weekends and holidays, where you are going to be faced with a family gathering or maybe going to a restaurant? That scared us to death at first, and we did a lot of declining of invitations too, but then we figured out how to manage this with a simple shift of our base guideline meal and snack numbers. No more declining invitations and no more stress about keeping within restrictions either! Isn't that what you want too?

From there, you need to learn how to choose recipes and adapt them to your needs. Once you have your personal meal and snack number, you can make your meal plan, calculate your daily totals, and be done tracking for the week.

Adapting recipes can be a lot of fun and gets your creativity flowing. When you are woken to the vast number of products and foods you can have, so many options open to you. I love experimenting with new foods and flavors and the hubby appreciates having something beyond the same old foods just rearranged in a different form.

But it doesn’t stop there! You need to know what to look for on labels, which ones to avoid, where to find products, how to shop effectively so you aren't spending so much time shopping, and it helps to know how to do some pre-investigating for items you need.

I cannot tell you the number of hours we have spent pouring over labels. Once I figured out the guidelines for the nutrition amounts and ingredients to keep an eye out for, it turned into a simple glance at the label, and I knew if it was going in my cart or not. Plus, those pesky percentages are no longer an issue. When that little box toward the bottom says 15% potassium, you need to know what that translates into milligrams.

To add a cherry to the top, you also need to understand the tricks to cooking (like seasoning!) that will bring about great flavors and textures. Since we can’t use much salt, we must use different techniques to bring about flavor. 

How you cook something and to what temp you cook it, makes an enormous difference. You can eat a properly cooked chicken breast, and use that dry, tough, overcooked one as a baseball.

And...

You need to learn the process, and this process starts your journey of compiling recipes that you have adjusted to your needs. You can even incorporate your family's needs too, and with repeated use, it gets to be very easy.

I know it may seem like a lot and too much to do, but if you have someone show you exactly how to do it, it doesn't seem so overwhelming and scary, does it?

Now, you can absolutely run to a dietician or nutritionist that specializes in kidney disease and have them create that meal plan for you. Then continue with all the follow up visits, and theeeeen, if something changes, you can start that process all over again.

OR..... you can learn how easy it is to create that meal plan yourself. It sounds hard, but that's only cos you haven't learned the simplified steps to do so.

One small step will start you on your way to successfully eating for CKD. But, you can’t get there if you don’t start now. 

Make things easy, save yer kidneys! 

Enroll Right Now or purchase the Books.

Math ah!! Scary for some, a breeze for others. Me… scary!

When we started, I vividly remember how soy sauce tried to be my friend but clearly was my enemy.

We used it in so many recipes and now, even the lower sodium stuff seemed way too high.

But we found we could use it, just not in the amounts we previously had.

So, now I had to figure out precisely how much sodium I was dealing with when using 2 tsp, but the label said the serving was 1 tbsp. Um... How do you figure it out?

This is what I heard... 

I have 5 apples, and I have 3 grapes, but I need to know how many purple bananas fit into 1 mile when 12 cars going 35 mph have run over 17 of them and I only have until dawn on Tuesday before the train traveling at 60 mph from Memphis to Chicago passes through here, how do I do that?"

Anything that suggests math, that's what my brain faces.

Math is an unavoidable piece of the CKD process and it's imperative to know the right calculations to arrive at those crucial numbers you need.

Math doesn’t have to be scary, and it doesn’t have to involve purple bananas or trains!

 Here's a tip: If that lower sodium soy sauce says a serving is 1 tbsp but you can only use 2 tsp, then take the amount in the 1 tbsp, divide it by 3 (cos that's how many tsp are in 1 tbsp). Now take the amount per tsp and double it.

480 (in 1 tbsp) / 3 (# of tsp in one tbsp) = 160.

160 is the amount per tsp.

We need 2 tsp, right? 160 x 2 = 320.

Those 2 tsp of soy sauce will add 320mg of sodium to your dish.

Happy Mathing!

If you are looking for all the step-by-step calculations needed for successful CKD eating, plus all the cheats you need to know, you can get them in the PRO section of the program, Book Two: The Core Method, or the Math Help mini course.