Food: The Daily Challenge for People With Chronic Pain
/By Crystal Lindell
One of the biggest hurdles many people with chronic pain face is finding something to eat. It’s literally a daily challenge that has to be solved.
Personally, it’s something I struggled with even before I started having chronic pain in my right ribs.
Finding food three times a day just isn’t easy. Anyone who tells you it’s easy probably has someone else who cooks for them, and does all the shopping and clean-up.
The temptation is to eat out, but that gets expensive fast – especially if you use delivery apps like DoorDash. So, over the years I have become an expert at feeding myself, even when I feel like crap and have no money.
In fact, these days I’m even a vegan, living in a small town in the Midwest, so the option to eat out most days doesn’t even exist.
Below are some realistic tips for feeding yourself even when you’re sick, broke, and a bad cook.
Level 1: Heat-and-Eat Meals
The first goal in feeding yourself is to avoid fast food and food delivery apps. Almost everything you get at the grocery store is going to be healthier and cheaper.
To avoid the strain of food preparation and cooking, look for anything that just needs to be opened and heated. This can include frozen meals and pizzas; canned meals like beef stew and ravioli; and refrigerated meals from grocery store deli sections.
When I first made it my goal to avoid eating out, I would literally stock my freezer with 14 frozen dinners each week. One of my friends commented that my refrigerator looked like an ad for Lean Cuisine. They aren’t cheap, but they are easy and they can offer a lot of variety.
Frozen and prepared foods tend to be more expensive than fresh food at the grocery store, but they are all significantly cheaper than DoorDash.
Level 2: Easy Cooking
When I say easy cooking, I mean easyyyyy cooking. So easy, you can do it on bad pain days.
If you can master this category, meals are also exponentially cheaper than prepared grocery food.
In this level I would include easy to prepare meals like spaghetti noodles with a jar of sauce, quesadillas, and cereal with a side of toast (warm toast really elevates the experience from sad and cold to warm and comforting). This level also includes sandwiches, whether it’s peanut butter and jelly or lunch meat.
There are weeks when I go days at a time living on vegan cheese quesadillas. For these, I simply put a non-stick pan on the stove, heat up a plain tortilla, add cheese, fold it over and eat. I dip it in vegan sour cream, hot sauce, or even add some microwaved vegan steak if I have any on hand. Voilà! A perfectly satisfying meal.
The trick to this category is to find meals you can make that don’t require you to chop a single thing. However, they may require you to pull out a pan.
If you have the energy to chop something, even better! Tomatoes and onions tend to make most things taste better.
For these meals, the microwave is still your best ally. There are a lot of foods usually cooked on the stove that can be cooked faster and easier in the microwave. So, if I’m adding some vegetables to my pasta, I will put the steam-in-the-bag version in the microwave first so they don’t have to be cooked on the stove top. Or if I’m adding vegan meatballs to sauce, I’ll heat them in the microwave first.
I firmly believe that a mix of Level 1 and Level 2 cooking can get most people through most days of the month when needed.
Level 3: Meal Prep
That brings us to the most difficult level of chronic pain cooking: Meal Prep.
For this category, you will probably need to chop things, and you may need to dirty multiple pots and pans.
The shopping, cooking, and the clean-up are both more extensive, but if you can pull it off, the rewards can last for weeks.
When I have a good pain day, I try to use some of my time in the morning to make a large dish, whether that’s a soup, chili, or a casserole. There’s no rule that says you have to cook dinner at dinnertime.
And I always triple the recipe so that I can eat leftovers for days. I’ll even make enough to freeze portions of it, essentially making my own frozen dinners.
Midwest cooking has a lot to offer for this category because our winters often make it hard to go to the grocery store more than once a week.
For example, chili is an especially great recipe in this category because you can do the whole thing with cans of beans and cans of tomatoes mixed with a chili seasoning packet in the crockpot. I add dried lentils to mine to give it a meaty texture, but you can also add something like cooked ground beef if you have the energy to make that on the stove top
I also love making vegan pot pie (I use chickpeas instead of chicken), potato soup, or a large batch of enchiladas.
I also have a bread machine, so when I have the energy, I like to throw the ingredients in there so I can have fresh, homemade bread for a few days. When I don’t want to deal with that, a loaf of $2 French bread from the grocery store bakery also hits the spot.
Eating three meals a day takes a lot of effort, and it’s understandable that a lot of people with chronic pain don’t have the physical or mental energy needed for cooking. But that doesn’t mean you have to eat out for every meal. Or starve yourself.
The trick is to forgive yourself for taking kitchen shortcuts, start off easy, and to find just a couple go-to homemade meals that you can make on autopilot. That’s more than enough. Then it’s just a matter of bon appétit!
