Hi everyone, Well day 1 went well for me diet wise. I really cut back on the junk and was feeling really god about myself and then........ My left arm has been giving me a little trouble over the last few weeks. I 've figured it to be just a little tendonitis so I've been taking a couple of aspirin at night. Last night the pain became unbearable and seemed to be radiating from my shoulder. I actually cried out and I'm pretty stoic usually. Ended up driving myself to the ER at 5:00 AM. Yep. Torn rotator cuff of the shoulder. I'm loopy on Vicodene (hate hate hate the stuff) and taking anti-inflammatories. See my regular doc tomorrow. So there goes any exercise for the time being. I hurts to roll over, it hurts to move anyhing. But I intend to stay on course with eating right. Of course all the meds are "take with food" :0( I'm happy to hear everyone is off to a good start. We can do gals! Pam, Glad to see you're better. Stay warm and dry. Soup is good. Tikanas, I will call soon. Drinking water is hard for me in the winter too. I really have to work at it. Take care, eat well and and keep moving on fellow losers.

Annie, i wasn't attempting to "pile on" or "pick a fight". I feel that lpink and the others who suggested eating plenty of fruit offered well meaning advice about general good eating habits. However, in this case, they were potentially, er, lethal ideas. In Dody's second sentence of her first post she states that her husband has high potassium. I also agree that Dody is smart enough not to take our advice. With the range of problems that her husband is facing, his diet, unfortunately, needs to be very limited and directed by his MD and RD who have full information and who can continue to monitor his potassium level. I was reading quite a bit more into what Dody said than lpink saw based on my training and the recognition of an entirely too familiar pattern. Lpink and the other fruitophiles couldn't really be expected to understand the downside to their advice, because it's not something that they would know about. I don't normally provide medical advice because I don't have enough information and because it would be improper anyway, but in this case "splurging" on fresh fruit made me cringe and reflexively say "no!" Believe it or not, I've actually seen loving, well meaning family members attempt to cure kidney problems with "juicing". Everybody knows that fruit is "healthy", right? For those of us with reasonably healthy kidneys and normal blood sugar it is! The "DASH" diet is a diet that is deliberately high in potassium. For most people it's a great diet, but not for Dody's DH, unfortunately. A lot of non-medical people may not realize that too much potassium in the blood can be life threatening. On the gardening forums someone may recommend a favorite plant and someone else may recommend against it and no hard feelings, but diet beliefs are often very personal. Here is a link that might be useful: Hyperkalemia -- The Mayo Clinic

Meat can be made into meatloaf or pate, or cooked as a braise or stew, which require little chewing. Salads require a lot of chewing. Try soups, terrines, hummus, smoothies, etc. Remember that you need to chew some to stimulate the saliva interaction that's an important part of digestion. Just use the softer stuff when you're really in pain. Quinoa needs to be "fluffy" to be nice to eat. The Kitchn has instructions which emphasize the fluffy. I haven't cooked through this one, but it looks right. The rubbing and rinsing step is important. What are you doing for the TMJ? If it hurts that much to chew, you might try an anti-inflammatory, and since you're talking about changing your diet, you could go towards an anti-inflammatory diet as well. Do you have a "wet" heating pad? (Not literally wet, but draws moisture from the air as it heats.) It's excellent for loosening up the muscles. Do you get any kind of physical therapy? Your insurance should pay for it. Besides traditional PT, chiropractors and Feldenkreis therapists have strategies for helping TMJ. If you're feeling tight, this really helps: Sit up or stand. Holding your head still, look up by moving your eyes to look up. Look down the same way while slowly dropping your jaw. Look up again while slowly raising your jaw closed. Repeat a few times. Now look up while slowly lowering your jaw, and look down while raising it. Repeat a few times. Now do the same side to side: Look to the right while moving your jaw to the right, then look left while moving your jaw to the left. Repeat several times. Reverse: Look to the right while moving your jaw to the left, then look left while moving your jaw to the right. Repeat. This sends the muscles into WTF mode and they get confused about how to overtighten and give up for awhile. Take care of yourself. Work the problem, not the symptoms.

The canola oil is important to the recipe. This was the answer to the same concern about canola oil, from a website that I get sent to Disney for trying to post. The canola oil story is a HOAX!! And that's all there is to it. Any "warnings" from an e-mail are 99 percent certain to be lies and hoaxes. Don't buy into it. "What we have here is a bit of truth about a product's family history worked into a hysterical screed against the product itself. There is no earthly reason to give any credence to this rumor -- Canola oil is not the horrifying product this widely-disseminated e-mail makes it out to be, nor has the FDA turned loose on the American public a health scourge worthy of being named one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. An appreciation of what this scare is based upon begins with a better understanding of what canola oil and how it came into being. The rape plant (Brassica napus) is a member of the mustard family, as claimed in the e-mail. However, before associations between rape and mustard gas set in too strongly, it should be noted turnip, cabbage, watercress, horseradish, and radish are also members of this family of plants. Rapeseed oil has been used for cooking for centuries in Europe, India, China, and Japan. As modern science is finding out, its previous use wasn't necessarily a guarantee of safety. Cooking at high temperatures with unrefined rapeseed oil now appears to be related to an increased risk of lung cancer because at high temperatures cooking oil gives off chemicals capable of causing mutations in cells. Unrefined rapeseed oil is particularly notable for this, but other oils also have this association. Those intent upon doing large amounts of wok cooking with any sort of cooking oil should therefore lower their frying temperature from the 240C to 280°C called for in Chinese cooking to 180°C. Rapeseed oil naturally contains a high percentage (30-60%) of erucic acid, a substance associated with heart lesions in laboratory animals. For this reason rapeseed oil was not used for consumption in the United States prior to 1974, although it was used in other countries. (Americans chose to use it as a lubricant to maintain Allied naval and merchant ships during World War II.) In 1974, rapeseed varieties with a low erucic content were introduced. Scientists had found a way to replace almost all of rapeseed's erucic acid with oleic acid, a type of monounsaturated fatty acid. (This change was accomplished through the cross-breeding of plants, not by the techniques commonly referred to as "genetic engineering.") By 1978, all Canadian rapeseed produced for food use contained less than 2% erucic acid. The Canadian seed oil industry rechristened the product "canola oil" (Canadian oil) in 1978 in an attempt to distance the product from negative associations with the word "rape." Canola was introduced to American consumers in 1986. By 1990, erucic acid levels in canola oil ranged from 0.5% to 1.0%, in compliance with U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) standards. This light, tasteless oil's popularity is due to the structure of its fats. It is lower in saturated fat (about 6%) than any other oil. Compare this to the high saturated fat content of peanut oil (about 18%) and palm oil (at an incredibly high 79%). It also contains more cholesterol-balancing monounsaturated fat than any oil except olive oil and has the distinction of containing Omega-3 fatty acids, a polyunsaturated fat reputed to not only lower both cholesterol and triglycerides, but also to contribute to brain growth and development. In other words, it's a healthy oil. One shouldn't feel afraid to use it because of some Internet scare loosely based on half-truths and outright lies."