Calories

When I was in the hospital, I started to research how to recover from a broken tibia plateau fracture. There were many things to learn, the importance of diet, exercise, pain management, sleep, mental attitude, I read a lot, gained a lot and it also reinforced many things I already knew. I already understood the importance of food to heal the body, despite much of medical professional preferring to use drugs to improve. In recent years I had not being following that knowledge and had only recently started to eat right to my beliefs. So it was of little surprise to me to read so many stories of people recovering from such traumas with whole natural raw foods. Add to this the fact that the hospital food was well, mediocre. So mum and my sister were bringing in huge bowls of salads, fruit, soups and nuts. In my reading what shocked me was how many articles talked about eating massive quantities of food, as in 3500-5000 calories per day. Compared to say 1500-2200 calories. Now I am not unfamiliar with eating huge volumes of food, but that is usually after days of cycling 4+ hours or kayaking 3+ hours or a day of 5 hours bushwalking. How could I need such food input sitting in a hospital bed, not moving, laying flat on my back? It made little sense. Let's move on six weeks; now I am home, visiting the physio for 90 minutes every two days, also doing my exercises at home and commuting to the physio and back, plus the add other social outings. Now I understand, I do need to be consuming 3500+ calories per day. The energy it takes to do everyday stuff is significantly higher than when entirely fit, the power it takes to endure a physio exercise session and fighting off the pain, lots of effort. So tonight I had a plate full of green salad, garlic toast and some pesto pasta with olives and feta. Unfortunately couldn't quite finish it.