Nuts!

If you are what you eat, then I am more than a little bit nuts these days. I wasn't eating tons of nuts until the low sodium diet kicked in and made it very difficult to find neat, portable foods that I can snack on. The vending machine certainly isn't an option now. I'm eating a lot of fruit, but fruits don't always satisfy and they don't travel well. Raw unsalted nuts seems like an easy target, so I've been consuming them daily. In fact, I am eating so many nuts every day I got a little concerned that this was perhaps a bad idea, and started poking around on the internet to see what I could learn.

The good news is that nuts are healthy foods that are OK for daily consumption, especially if you are eating them in place of unhealthy snacks. Even though nuts are high in fat, they are also high in protein, fiber and vitamins. Best of all they help lower cholesterol.

The bad news (and it is only minor bad news) is that some of my favorite nuts are not the best ones for you to eat, although they still convey some of the same health benefits as the better nuts. Cashews are my favorite, and macadamias are a nice treat. Both of these varieties are fattier than almonds, walnuts and peanuts.

The bottom line is that any kind of raw unsalted nut makes a fine snack that doesn't add sodium to your diet. And as long as you are not eating truckloads of them, they are more likely to help you than to harm you. As for me, I plan to continue my nutty snack habit.

The First Day

The day I got the diagnosis was almost anticlimactic. After my hearing test, which showed low-frequency hearing loss in my left ear, there were two likely possible causes: an acoustic neuroma (which is a benign brain tumor) or something called "Meniere's Disease". When I first started experiencing symptoms and searching for possible causes, I had ruled both of these out because they are rare. Unfortunately for me, all the common causes were ruled out by my doctors after lots of tests. So it turned out to be Meniere's by default - because it wasn't any of that other stuff.

I was pretty bummed out by the news that the primary treatment was a low sodium diet. I'll have to do that forever, and hopefully it will prevent the vertigo attacks and stabilize my hearing loss where it is now. Most importantly, we don't want this spreading to the other ear.

Disappointed, but determined to cheer ourselves up, my husband and I decided to go hear a live band at a bar that evening. I knew it would be a challenge to find something I could eat, but what the hell. I ordered the garden salad with grilled steak and balsamic vinaigrette on the side. I didn't think it would be that salty, which was a nice theory, but when I got the salad it was also covered in cheese (which has lots o' sodium) and black olives (which contain metric craploads of sodium). I felt like a little kid having to pick all that out of the salad before I ate it.

And that was the not-so-awesome start of my new low sodium lifestyle. I'd like to say it gets better from here, but so far this is hard as hell. I feel like there is so little I can actually eat and I am constantly HUNGRY. It is probably way too early to make any sort of prognostications. I'd settle for learning more about what I can and can't eat and having meal choices not be such a damn depressing chore. Time will tell. I hope I get better at this. I also hope that my taste buds adjust and at some point things will not universally taste like they need salt!!!