Breast Cancer Awareness Tip# 14: Diet tips for breast cancer patients

Here's why you should pay attention to your diet.

If you have been diagnosed with breast cancer, along with the shock of the condition comes the confusion about how you can enhance your lifestyle while undergoing the treatment and how you can deal with the symptoms. Well, here's a tip you can use -- eat well.

According to Julie Gralow of Breast Medical Oncology at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and co-author of Breast Fitness , ' You may prefer and tolerate cooked food versus raw veggies. So maybe a healthy vegetable stew or soup may be better than, say, a bowl of salad.' So pick, and eat those foods that you feel are palatable and help reduce nausea. Cancer treatment can affect your ability to taste and smell. It can also affect your digestion. Hence, it is important to eat foods that you can tolerate and digest.

Apart from that, she suggests eating small but frequent meals to help reduce the nausea and feel more energetic.

Keeping a track of your calories is also extremely essential at this point. Julie suggests not overindulging in fatty foods and over stepping your daily calorie requirement. If you see that you are gaining weight or are experiencing rapid weight loss, make sure you eat healthy and manage your weight well.

Finally, know that being diagnosed with breast cancer is not a death sentence. According to Dr Dhairyasheel Savant, Consultant Cancer & Reconstructive Surgeon, Asian Institute of Oncology, recognising and managing the condition can help improve the treatment outcome by almost 25%. So the odds could be in your favour.

But that's not all, eating right, doing some meditation and yoga can also help you cope with the ailment better. Here are a few more breast cancer awareness tips that may help.

You may also like to read:

Breast Cancer Awareness Month Tip #11: Meditate for 45 minutes everyday

Try yoga to prevent breast cancer

Previous tip

Image source: Shutterstock

---

For more articles on diseases & conditions, visit our diseases & conditionssection. For daily free health tips, sign up for our newsletter. For health related Q&A, click here!