Thank you! That is such a lovely thing to say
I’m so incredibly lucky because my husband is just as supportive of me. He’s absolutely my best friend and confidante and he’s the biggest blessing God has ever given me. I think it’s beautiful that you want to help your husband too. I hope he’s not too unwell right now.
I would be more than happy to share the plan we did. It’s really so simple and very adjustable. Maybe it would help the OP’s wife too!
Diet wise I researched everything that was beneficial and harmful for the immune system and these were the changes we made:
- No sugar, dairy, gluten or processed food.
- Healthy snacks only (gluten-free toast with natural peanut butter, berries or other low sugar fruits, nuts etc.)
- Eat foods that are helpful for your symptoms and for building the immune system like avocados, low fat meats, leafy green vegies etc. (kiwi fruit completely took away his horrible cramps)
- Use lots of herbs and spices to make food tasty
Basically, every single thing that goes into the body has to be of benefit to the body. Which doesn’t mean deprivation, God made us beautiful tasty foods, our taste buds just sometimes need to readjust to nature and we have to get creative.
Exercise wise I did heaps of research and focused on weights not cardio Because his autoimmune disease attacked his lungs he needed to build up the biggest muscles in his body because they help you breathe (quads, hamstrings, glutes, biceps and triceps we started with).
He was also wheelchair bound initially because he’d spent time in an induced coma where they hadn’t given him physio (probably because he wasn’t expected to survive). Initially, his exercise was raising one foot at a time off the ground while sitting for 10 counts each foot or until his oxygen dropped into the 70s, then we would stop and wait for it to hit the high 80’s and do another set. Everything was done in sets of 10. For the upper body, I had him do bicep curls with a small tin of beetroot. We did these until he could stand on his own.
I recorded his oxygen and heart rate stats from a finger monitor every day so that he could see his progress and keep motivated.
Then we started with the walker, initially just standing then sitting, then doing heel raised and eventually, walking down the hallway, 3 times a day slowly increasing the distance (at first it was literally 3 steps). Then when that was too easy we got a reclining exercise bike. It was really important to only do upper or lower body at a time. Both were too much. He did each type of exercise until it became too easy and then we increased the difficulty rather than the time involved because they focus was building muscle not increasing cardio fitness because that was too risky.
(continued in next post because I went over the word count. Sorry!)
I’m going to join a class on ‘heart health’ when it’s offered in a couple of weeks.