Michael Wilson, a dietitian working at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, shares his advice for healthy eating when you have a bleeding disorder.
He explains that healthy eating is particularly important for people with bleeding disorders, as it helps maintain a healthy weight, supports joint and muscle health, and can improve mental wellbeing. Also of importance is getting all of your adequate vitamins and minerals – in particular, iron, especially for women with bleeding disorders, who are at particularly high risk of heavy menstrual bleeding.
Michael’s key tip is to “start small and gradually build up momentum,” and to “make a plan”.
Transcript
Hi. My name is Michael, and I’m a dietitian working at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital in Brisbane, Australia. So we know healthy eating, it’s important for everyone. It helps prevent chronic disease, makes us, you know, supports our gut health and bone health. But I guess for people with bleeding disorders, it’s important for three key reasons.
Maintaining a healthy weight
The first one, is maintaining a healthy weight. And one thing to think about is joint health. So for an extra five kilos of extra body weight, that puts an extra 10 to 20 kilos pressure on the joints. And so we know that this extra weight over time can lead to increased joint bleeds, increased pain, difficulty moving around. And yeah, so that difficulty with doing your day-to-day activities.
Another point with, maintaining a healthy weight, it supports ease of veinous access. So we know that for some people, if you’re at a higher weight, it does make home or self-infusion a little bit harder. And lastly, we know that particularly people with severe haemophilia there is there are higher risk of loss of muscle mass. Due to their, some concerns around engaging in physical activity. But this is changing with better treatments. So it’s really important to, you know, maintain a healthy weight, support your muscle mass, retain your strength so you don’t fall over when you’re older.
Acquiring adequate vitamins and minerals
So the second key point is that a healthy, balanced diet can mean that you’re getting all your adequate vitamins and minerals to support blood replenishment and wound healing. And one particular nutrient of interest here is iron. So women with bleeding disorders are particularly high risk of heavy menstrual bleeding. So in these cases doctors should really be checking the iron and looking at supplementation or iron infusion if needed.
But across the board everyone with a bleeding disorder doesn’t need to start any dietary supplements. We take a food first approach, and these supplements can be a bit of a backup, if you’re not getting enough from your food. And I would just say take caution with some of the herbal and vitamin supplements and chat to your doctor, because some of these can impact your bleeding risk.
Mental wellbeing
And the third thing we know about why healthy eating is important for people with bleeding disorders is there is high risk of anxiety and depression when people are living with a lifelong illness. So this general healthy eating can really support your mental wellbeing. And there’s these really strong links between the brain and the gut. And so healthy eating can really support our mental health and make us feel good.
Where to start
So if you want to lose weight or make a change to eat healthier, it is tricky because we’re all busy. We live in a world where there’s so much sort of heavily processed, cheap, calorie dense food around us. So we know it’s not easy. But I would say the best thing to do is start small and gradually build up momentum.
So I find the biggest thing that often goes wrong is people take this all or nothing approach. They try to change everything overnight and it just leaves them sort of falling off the bandwagon, going back to what they were previously previously eating and trying to start again. You know, the next Monday. Whereas the better approach is change one thing. For example, say if you want to have more dairy to support your bone health, perhaps you start doing that 2 or 3 times a week. Treat it as an experiment.
I think another important thing is making a plan. So actually thinking about, okay, I want to increase my dairy to support my bone health. When am I going to do that? Will I have it as a snack or I have it before bed and actually map it out? Then also think about what’s going to get in the way of you actually achieving that. Because we all have busy lives. Maybe you have kids, you have two jobs and actually pre-empt what’s going to stop you from achieving that and, and come up with some solutions ahead of time, maybe leave some dairy at work, some sort of pre-portioned tubs of yoghurt, something easy that leads to success.
What to do if it doesn’t work out
So if you fail and we know it, it is hard to make change. But I just say treat it like an experiment. If you’ve tried something and it didn’t work, perhaps that strategy or that plan wasn’t most suitable for your life. So I would say just treat it as sort of trial and error. Try it. And if that didn’t work, try something else. Don’t just throw in the towel and go back to what you were doing before. It’s all about that small, gradual change, and that’s a bit more sustainable in the long term.
