Out of gas. That’s often me (and many multiple sclerosis battlers) by the end of a day. Especially a busy day. Or a day when symptoms or circumstances (or both) are fighting at full volume. Maybe that’s when I need to fuel up, but it’s frequently when actually cooking up a full meal is a tall order.
Maybe you’ve been there.
It’d be simple to grab takeout, open a can of something quick, toss a pizza in the oven, or pick an instant ready-to-nuke meal out of the freezer. But I’d probably be sorry within an hour or two (or by the next morning), once the high salt content (and likely the MSG) kicked in.
It’s OK to eat like that once in a while, and sometimes it can hardly be helped. But I’ve found it sure doesn’t help the MS life, if it becomes a routine.
Still, it can be extremely tough to pull out pots and pans and whip up a fresh nutritious meal during the hardest part of the entire of a rough MS day.
Let’s face it. Cooking with MS is not nearly as fun as cooking was before MS showed up. Heat is not the MSer’s friend. When we turn up the heat (on the stove or grill or in the oven) and stand there stirring or flipping our food, our worst MS symptoms can start to swirl into action. (This MS reality is called Uhthoff’s Phenomenon. When the MSer’s body heat rises, symptoms flare. It usually happens with exercise, fever, or really warm weather. It’s why we steer clear of saunas, hot-tubs, and steamy showers. And it sometimes comes up with cooking too.)
The spoon theory thing doesn’t help, either.
This popularly proclaimed theory basically says that people with certain chronic health problems (such as MS, lupus, arthritis, and more) have limited, and generally unpredictable, energy reserves (and pain tolerance) on any given day. That concept might be pictured as a handful of spoons. And those spoons get used up, as the day wears on. By nightfall, there’s no telling whether a person will have any spoons left at all.
You get the point.
Spoons or no spoons, the dinner hour arrives, along with energy depletion and the need for nutrition.
A little planning and some advance preparation can save the day, if I actually do those things.
After too many years of struggling with on-the-spot supper preparation on my worst MS days, I finally began carving out extra time (usually on weekend mornings) to do some advance meal preparation. This is when I clean and chop greens and veggies for salads and stir fry, bake a big pan of chicken, make a meatloaf, boil a bunch of eggs, crockpot some soup, and fry up a couple pounds of ground beef. Those are just examples, as the list varies from week to week.
Then I divide the cooked items into separate containers (each containing enough for one evening), mark and date them, and stick them in the fridge and freezer.
As the week wears on, it really helps to have the hardest part of each night’s meal prep already done. When MS burnout hits, I don’t have to sweat out supper. And it’s a whole lot easier to make healthy food choices when I’m not desperately poking around in the kitchen after having reached the MS nightmare point-of-no-return for the night.
Because MS seems to pick up steam right about when we’re
running out of it.
Related items:
- Life
with MS: Sometimes you feel like toasting, but other times you're just toast.
- MS +
MSG = Mess
- Remember
hot showers? Not with MS.
- Remember
when bathing didn’t make you blind?
- With MS, a hot flash may not be a hot flash at all.
Image/s: Adapted from public domain image/s.
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