Mixed Messages

OkI've been doing reading and research and have been getting a lot of mixed messages.  It seems like there's two camps.  Those that say you can reduce or even cure your cancer by cutting out sugars, red meats, and alcohol and switch to a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains.  The other camp says eat healthy, but cutting out sugars, red meats, and alcohol won't help.

Then there's the statistic I keep seeing that 40% of cancer patients die not from the cancer but from malnutrition.  I could see this being caused by severely restricting your diet to fruits, vegetables and grains.  It's really hard to get calories from those foods.  Then you add radiation and chemotherapy on top of that which reduce your appetite and I could definitely seeing people starve to death.

I think what I need to take away from this is, in the coming months of treatment, I need to place calories as a priority.  I'll try to get as much from fruits, vegetables, grains, fish and chicken.  But if I'm in a deficit near the end of the day I'll need to make an exception to get the required calories.  However, that may be harder to make up at the end of the day.  It may be a better tactic to eat some heavy hitters throughout the day.  I just need to find some healthy heavy hitters.

The last several days I've been tracking my caloric intake and can see I've been falling short.  I've been making adjustments trying to get my calories up.  This has just been a big change and it's a steep learning curve adjusting my diet like this trying to find healthy foods with decent calories.  The hardest part is counting the calories of pieced together meals or when dining out.  It's difficult to figure out calories when the food is not packaged.

My Fitbit app does a pretty good job helping me look up and log my caloric intake.  I also have a scale at home that I've been using to weigh raw foods to get their calorie count.  It will take a little time for me to adjust.  I just need to make sure that during this adjustment period I don't fall too far back, especially before my surgery which is only two weeks away.

Luckily I don't have any food allergies and I can pretty much eat anything without it bothering me.  So my options are endless and pretty much revolve around taste.  I'm not a picky eater and will eat pretty much anything as long as it's decent tasting.  So, I have that going for me.

On a side note, I think I've been a little obsessed with trying to find a reason why I got this. I've been hoping to make a correction with diet, exercise and attitude.  Sure, I can do with some changes in those departments anyway.  But I need to quit playing the blame game.  There's plenty of people who do everything "right" and still get cancer.  As they say, "Sometimes shit just happens."  I just need to keep my head up and keep fighting this thing.