Renal Diet Headquarters Podcast 048 – What to Pack in a Bento Box That Is Good For a Kidney Diet

Podcast #48 Released on July 8, 2015 Send in your questions about all things related to chronic kidney disease to [email protected] What to Pack in a Bento Box That Is Good For a Kidney Diet Welcome to the Renal Diet Headquarters podcast with your host, Mathea Ford, CEO of Renal Diet headquarters. This is our weekly talk about how you can succeed with a kidney diet. Brought to you by renaldiethq.com, a website whose mission is to be the most valued resource on kidney disease that people can use to improve their health. Hello. Welcome to the Renal Diet Headquarters podcast number 48. I am here to talk to you about things that are healthy for a renal diet. And today I want to talk about bento boxes. You can find all the information I'm going to talk about today at www.renaldiethq.com/048. Again, that's renaldiethq.com/048. So today, last week we talked about vacation healthy eating, and I gave you some ideas on how to stay healthy on a renal diet during your vacation. And today I want to talk about bento boxes because I think they are the best thing ever, first packing your lunches, but also just for controlling portions. So let's get started. First of all, what is a bento box? You may have never heard of it. You probably don't even know how to spell it. It's bento box. A bento box is a style of packing meals for lunches, etc. So, typically there are multiple small containers or compartments inside of a bento box. These allow for variety as well as healthy portion sizes. Bento boxes are reusable tupperware style dishes. They cut down on a lot of waste, which can save you money as well as help the environment. So, it's like a bigger box and then there's little nesting boxes within it and they're different sizes and they have lids. So, that's what I think makes it so great for portion control, easy packing. It's probably a six by eight or a twelve by nine depending on. It's not as big as a piece of paper. I'm sitting here looking at mine. It's probably a six by eight size box. And inside you've got the smaller boxes, like I said. So, bento boxes are perhaps one of the easiest ways to pack a healthy and portion controlled meal to go. Bento boxes can be purchased from websites such as laptoplunches.com and I'll put some links in there to some good portion control ones or other websites and Amazon as well. So, I will put links to some different good bento boxes that I like. You don't have to have a special lunch box to make a bento box, though. You don't have to buy one of those. You can do your own using some small tupperware containers. Packing your lunch this way makes packing lunches or other meals super easy and can help guide you with better portion sizes. So, instead of putting just however much you feel like is probably enough for the if you're eating almonds, you can use a small bento box container and know that okay, only so much goes in there and that will help you keep your controlled packaging, your portions. Each of the boxes is a different size, so you may have some really small ones that only hold a tablespoon or two tablespoons, like for your salad dressing. And then you have maybe a two cup in there that will hold your lettuce and maybe some chicken on top. And so when you are ready to make it, you would take it out, get your lettuce box out, put your salad dressing on it and eat it. And then you'd have a couple of other little bento boxes as well that might have some fruit in them, might have peanut butter, might have your other little dessert that you're going to have, or some other types of meat if you're eating another kind of meat. But it keeps everything separate. So, you can actually even store your snacks in there and you just have to keep it refrigerated. So, let's talk about some kidney healthy options for a bento box. Kidney healthy options for a bento box are going to be ways to keep your m...