Eating habits when you’re ill

When you're ill there is a lot happening in your body. Your body needs to work hard to fight off your illness and keeping the rest of your body as healthy as possible. An illness could start in different ways to affect you. You have an acute illness; from being healthy at one moment, the next moment you're ill and it has a serious impact on the quality of life. When the illness lasts for a couple of months it becomes chronic. An illness could also gradually sneak into your life. Especially when it causes discomfort but you can still retain your former lifestyle, it's easy to let it slip into your life without taking action on it. In this post we'll focus on illnesses that have a serious impact on your quality of life, regardless of being acute or chronic.

When your quality of life is impacted it's often that you're not as active as you was before. You stop exercising, you go less outdoors, you see your friends less often, you have less urge to go shopping, you probably don't work anymore, you tidy up and clean your house less often, etc. All these activities seem so common, so natural. Also you need energy to do all these activities. And your body gets energy from the food you eat. So when all of a sudden your lifestyle becomes significant less active, you don't need the energy to pull of all of these activities. By following this train of thoughts, you should eat less when you become ill.

Another train of thoughts is that your body needs to work extra hard to repair itself and become healthy again. To fuel that extra work you should eat more than normally to support your body in its needs.

I was struggling with this quite a lot. I had a car accident so the impact on my life was acute. After a while I noticed I was gaining weight. I was already low on calorie intake and I didn't want my body to go into disstress because of a way to low calorie intake and don't even have enough energy for vital functions; breathing, staying warm, etc. Also I wasn't sure whether my increase of weight was because of my eating pattern or whether I was retaining moisture. I felt bloated and the scale was going up and down 3 to 4 kilo's a day. That doesn't look normal for weight changes due to food. So I decided to ask a nutritionist for help. This are the 5 tips she had for me:

1. Eat more

The last thoughts were the ones to follow: your body needs to work extra hard to repair itself and become healthy again. To fuel that extra work you should eat more than normally to support your body in its needs. Not extensively more, but like 200-250 calories more. It should to the trick. You can always eat more veggies. Snack cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, that's always okay to eat.

2. Listen to your body

Your body tells you quite clear when to eat, what to eat and how much to eat. If you have cravings, moderately give in to them. So if your body craves chocolate, eat some chocolate. Just don't go overboard and eat the whole bar at once. Also a chocolate craving tells you that you need to sleep more. If your body just craves sugar, you could also choose fruit to still that hunger. If you planned to eat breakfast at 9am but you don't feel like eating breakfast at 9, just don't do it. You body will tell you what it needs, so listen to it. Or if you planned pasta for dinner but by the time you're cooking dinner, or even when it's already served, you don't feel like pasta but would love to eat soup instead. Please listen to your body and eat soup. It's more important that you eat a healthy meal of something you like than that you eat just a few bites of something that doesn't feel okay.

3. Don't look at the scale

There are more ways to know how your body is and whether you're gaining of losing weight than using the scale. Especially when you're on medication. Drugs can increase your moisture retention. So there can be immense fluctuations in your weight that aren’t representative. Some advice: just stay off the scale and look at your overall calorie intake per day. Another measurement instrument is your clothes. But this one is more tricky as moisture retention can make you bloated whereof your clothes won't fit the same way as normally.

4. Sleep enough

Sleep is extremely important. Sleep is usually already important, it's called beauty sleep for a reason. When you’re asleep your body can focus on healing you. As you need extra support when you’re ill, it helps to spend some extra hours in bed. Listen to your body about what your limit is regarding being active. When you don’t sleep enough it will show in your nutritional intake and cravings. Chocolate is a wonderful example. When you crave for chocolate more than just once, consider whether you’re sleeping enough or whether your body is trying to tell you to sleep more often.

5. Gut hungry or mind hungry

When you’re ill you often have more free time on your hands and also some spare space in your mind. And with all the food we see on social media and tv, you’re thinking about food a lot of times throughout the day. Therefor it’s harder to distinguish whether feeling hungry is gut hungry (aka the ‘real’ hungry) or mind hungry. Hoe to tell the difference? Tip from a nutritionis: set an alarm for 20 mins and go do something during those 20 mins. So don’t go 20 mins waiting in front of the fridge ;-). If you still feel hungry after those 20 mins, grab something to eat. What would make a good snack? a handful of nuts.

This is all from personal experiences, and won't guarantee that this is the best option for you. Every person is different and react different to influences, products and treatments.

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