Here are a few tips continued from my last post.
- It is important to eat fruits and vegetables that are in season. What is in season tastes better, and costs much less than what is out of season.
- Another tip is to visit the Farmers market or join a co-op, these often have discounted vegetables and fruits and they are mostly organic.
- Try new foods and vegetables, buy fresh herbs to season your food.
- Instead of dumping salt in everything, use lemon and lime zest and the juice to add flavor to your foods.
- Try some of the super foods when in season such as blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and gogi berries.
- Give Tofu a try, it is very inexpensive and a good meat substitute.
- Ease into giving up meat if you cannot do it all of a sudden. Have one vegetarian day a week, for a month then have another one. Keep adding on days until you can go several weeks without meat. Just have it in your mind that a few days being meat free will not hurt you.
- Add more vegetables to your diet, and eat more fruit. I cannot stress this enough! Suggestions are a fruit for ‘dessert’ with every meal, and a vegetable as one of your side dishes with every meal.
- Have a big salad for dinner with a small baked sweet potato seasoned with cinnamon and a healthy oil ~ (olive oil or coconut oil)
- For snacks eat baby carrots, hummus with vegetable or baked pita chips you can make yourself.
- Avoid white products (white flour, white rice, white sugar, and bread) and switch to whole wheat flour, brown rice, trubinado sugar, agave nectar, and whole wheat bread.
These first few steps will make you healthier and feel better. Your body will undergo what is called a healing crisis. Basically it is detoxing and removing all the toxins out of your body as you start to eat healthier and feel better. When I became vegetarian I did it gradually. I threw away all the beef and pork. I ate chicken and fish for another year. Then I stopped eating chicken, and only ate seafood for two years. It was a gradually process, but I eventually stopped eating seafood.
I cannot force you to eat right or become vegetarian; I can only tell you what eating better has done for me. It has changed my life. I have been a vegetarian for 25 years. Along with holistic therapies I have never been healthier. I still get sick, but I have not been hospitalized in eighteen months. Once, I went for four years without a hospitalization. I have Sickle Cell SS, which is thought to be the worst type. And yet, I am healthy. I work out, teach people to be yoga teachers.
I am fortunate to have a hectic life that does not revolve around my illness. That is what matters. That you live a life instead of being sick all the time and not enjoying your life as much. These small changes will make you want to take even better care of yourself. Once you incorporate these changes into your life you will feel like making more healthy changes like exercising, doing yoga, taking a walk. Take the first few steps into becoming a healthier and stronger version of you.
Thank you for the info. I am a mother of a child with sickle cell and would love to know more about how to manage this disease. We have a good Ped Hematogolist but I am concerned about later in life. What are some of the books you read concerning diet that I can refer to?
I just purchased me a Nutri Ninja from their website 6 days ago on Saturday the 16th, I revived it 3 days later on Tuesday the 19th. This is simply the BEST INVESTMENT that I have ever made in all 35 years of my life!! I had been looking at purchasing one for the past year & a half but I needed t o find out which model unit would suit me best for my sickle cell along with my cooking skills. I got it for a GREAT deal for only $119.95 and was able to break it down into 3 monthly payments of only $39.95. I have only had it in my possession for the past 3 days and I have already made 9 smoothies (2 were vanilla & banana shakes). I also take 100mg of liquid chlorophyll so this is really good for when I make a green smoothie, I know that sweet potatoes & beets are good for our sickle cell but I am NOT a fan of either nor am I a fan of bananas. But when I tell you EVERY smoothie I have made for the past 3 days has had a pice of banana in it, I don’t make any smoothies without a piece of banana because I have noticed that all my life I have gone into the hospital and have had to take those huge potassium pills because my potassium was low. So I figured what other way to increase my potassium but by adding 1/2 of one to each smoothie I make every day, now that I can drink my smoothies without tasting the actual banana I thought I may as well purchase me a beet & a sweet potato and cut them up and add small pieces of them into certain smoothies I make. If I do this and like the taste then this will be a GREAT investment into my health, I now go into the hospital no more than twice/year (I went 3 times last year 11/21/15 and got out 12/2/15) for the past 2 years due to me taking methadone. If I can drink 1 smoothie everyday (so far I’ve been drinking 3/day) and incorporate certain vegetables that helps my body from suckling and cause me to only be hospitalized ATLEAST once/year then that will be the biggest change with me and my diet for the best. The fact that I can drink something & have NO CHUNKS of any kind in my smoothie is beyond amazing and worthwhile to my taste buds. I wouldn’t even know that it contains vegetables if I didn’t make it myself, I also bought me some Chia seeds for my smoothies which are a good source of potassium also as well as fiber, calcium & manganese. The Nutri Ninja is the BEST juicer/smoothie maker on the market & if you don’t like to eat certain fruits and vegetables then juicing and making smoothies would be a very valuable thing to do and incest in to get the daily vitamins and nutrients that your body needs to receive. The Nutri Ninja also cuts through ice making it soft as snow!! No ther juicer is sharp as the Nutri Ninja nor cuts through ice, frozen fruits and vegetable to perfection like this & it is a GREAT way to get your kids to drink their daily recommendation of fruits and vegetables that they don’t like to eat off their plate. I was able to make a very tasty smoothie for my neighbor granddaughter with spinach and celery and she simplythat smoothie and asked me to make her some moreLast but not least I found out about EVENFLO from Healing Blends through other sicklers and ordered me 4 bottles so I can’t wait to see how these 3 things (EVENFLO, Chlorophyll & smoothies) are going to improve the quality of my life living with sickle cell giving me less frequent crisis. You can go to their website and Google EVENFLO and read up on it and see how it works with so many sicklers and could help with yours too, many sicklers said they no longer even take the Dilaudid and methadone like I do all because of the EVENFLO as well as they haven’t seen the inside of a hospital in OVER A YEAR and others 2 years!! This is the goal I am trying to get to and with me having SS going from being in the hospital a good 6 times a year to now only twice a year is a HUGE improve,ent for me, so now I am going to focus on getting that number down to only once a year or every other year