The emails arrive in two parts.
The first part is long. It is about somebody else — a husband three weeks out from surgery, a mother who has stopped eating much of anything, a daughter whose numbers came back wrong. What to put in front of them now. Is the juice too much sugar. How do you get greens into a man who has never willingly eaten a salad in his life.
The second part is one line, near the end, and it usually arrives as an apology. I know I should be taking better care of myself too.
And then nothing. No question attached to it, no follow-up — just the line, and the sign-off.
You are not the only one doing this
There are about 63 million adults in this country caring for somebody — one in every four. Sixty-one percent of them are women. Close to a quarter are giving forty hours a week or more, which is a full-time job set on top of whatever was already there. One in five say their own health is fair or poor. Those are 2025 figures, and the number of caregivers has grown by nearly half since 2015.
Her own appointments are the first to go. In a 2018 survey, 35 percent of caregivers said they had skipped routine care of their own because of the caring they were doing.
The plate goes the same way, and it goes without anybody noticing. Researchers in Baltimore scored the diets of nearly two thousand adults between 30 and 64 against the national dietary standard. People caring for grandchildren daily or weekly scored lower than people who had never been caregivers, and the whole group averaged around 49 out of a possible 100. Lower whole fruit. Lower vegetables. Lower whole grains. That was published in 2021.
Nobody sat down and chose that. It is what a plate turns into when somebody else’s day sets the clock — and of everything on this page, it is the piece you can change this week without asking anyone.
Your body is still rebuilding, whether or not you have time for it
The body does not pause its work because you are busy. It is making new blood, new skin, new lining for your gut, new immune cells, the entire time you are sitting in waiting rooms and answering the phone at six in the morning. All of it is built out of what you hand it.
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. — Genesis 1:29
That design did not come with a clause about convenience. It came with the expectation that the food would be simple — picked, washed, eaten. That is useful news for a woman with ten minutes.
The food that asks the least of you is the food that was already best for you
Cooking is the step that falls away first in a caring house. Everything below skips it.
Fresh juice, and BarleyMax. A glass of fresh vegetable juice reaches the bloodstream fast, because removing the fiber is what lets it move quickly. On the mornings there is no time to set up a juicer and wash it afterward, BarleyMax is barley and alfalfa grass juice dried at low temperature — a teaspoon in water, taken away from food, down in the time it takes to find your keys. The minerals it carries are the first thing we would protect in a stretch like this. If one thing survives a hard month, let it be this.
Raw vegetables and fruit, prepared once. Not every day. Once. One session at the sink — carrots, celery, peppers, cucumber, a few heads of greens washed and dried — and the week has food in it that requires no decision at seven at night. Salad in a Jar is the version of this we keep coming back to, because it survives four days in a refrigerator and it travels to a hospital parking lot.
Seeds and nuts where your hand already goes. Pumpkin seeds for zinc. Ground flaxseed, chia and walnuts for omega-3. Sesame and tahini, almonds and figs for calcium. A jar of pumpkin seeds beside the kettle gets eaten; a bag at the back of a cupboard does not. If this year has been a long one, what a hard year takes out of you is worth reading alongside this.
Beans from a jar. Protein and iron with no stove involved. Rinse them, put them on top of the greens, add lemon or red pepper in the same meal so the iron is better absorbed.
November takes the vitamin D out of the equation
From November through February, sunlight over most of this country will not make vitamin D in your skin. It was measured directly: in Boston, at 42 degrees north, cloudless winter days produced none. Further north, in Edmonton, the ineffective stretch runs October through March. That measurement dates from 1988.
You are also indoors more than usual, and indoors with somebody who cannot easily get out. So vitamin D through the winter months comes from a supplement. Ground flaxseed covers the omega-3 side. B-Flax-D carries both, so that is one bottle instead of two.
Do not aim at the minimum
Most people reading this were already running low before the caring started. The ordinary advice — a serving of this, a handful of that — is written for somebody holding steady on what she already has. If you have spent eight months on toast and whatever came back from the table, holding steady is not the goal you need. Rebuilding asks for more. More greens, more juice, more actual food, for longer than it will feel necessary. The first two weeks will not tell you much; the sixth will.
And if the person you were caring for has died, the problem changes shape — appetite goes, and cooking for one feels like a formality. We wrote about that separately in grief and loss of appetite.
If the tiredness is the main thing
Caring for somebody is tiring in a way that sleep does not fix, and it is easy to file all of it under stress and leave it there. Sometimes that is the whole story, and sometimes there is something underneath it that food reaches. Why you are so tired all the time walks through what we look at first, and if you want somebody to look at the picture with you, a nutritionally minded health care professional is the right person to ask.
If you are the one going along on treatment days, what to pack for chemo day covers the bag. Pack it twice — one for the person you are with, one for you.
One more thing
You did not get here by being careless. You got here by putting somebody else first for a long stretch, and your own body has been paying for it the whole time. Nothing above is a program, and none of it has to be earned. A teaspoon of grass juice, a jar of seeds, an hour at the sink on a Sunday.
Start with the juice. Everything else can wait for the week after.
Blessings,
Paul and Ann Malkmus
Questions we get
I barely have ten minutes. What is the single thing worth doing?
Fresh vegetable juice, or a teaspoon of BarleyMax in water if there is no time to clean a juicer. It takes the least time of anything on this page and it carries the most.
Is it selfish to spend money on supplements for myself right now?
Food comes first, always — the juice and the greens and the seeds do the heavy work. Supplements are tools that sit on top of that. Through the winter, vitamin D is the one that earns its place, because sunlight is not supplying it.
I am eating whatever is left on the plate because throwing food away feels wrong. Is that so bad?
It is understandable, and it is also how a caregiver’s diet quietly becomes somebody else’s diet. Decide on Sunday what is in the house, so that what is within reach at nine at night is already something you would choose.
I have put on weight since this started. Where do I begin?
With what goes in rather than what comes out. Add the juice, add the raw food, add the greens before the meal, and let the rest settle. Pulling things out first tends not to hold.
How long before I feel different?
Longer than you would like. Most people notice something in the third or fourth week, and more by the second month. If you have been running low for a year, give it a season.
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Sources
- National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP, Caregiving in the US 2025 — report highlights, July 2025. https://www.caregiving.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/CGUS-2025-Toolkit-Highligts-and-Key-Messages_July-2025.pdf
- AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, Caregivers often neglect their own needs while providing care, 2018. https://www.longtermcarepoll.org/infographic-caregivers-often-neglect-their-own-needs-while-providing-care/
- Hossain S, Beydoun MA, Evans MK, Zonderman AB, Kuczmarski MF. “Caregiver Status and Diet Quality in Community-Dwelling Adults.” Nutrients, 2021;13(6):1803. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8227086/
- Webb AR, Kline L, Holick MF. “Influence of season and latitude on the cutaneous synthesis of vitamin D3.” Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 1988;67(2):373–378. https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/67/2/373/2652007
Last reviewed 9 November 2026.
We offer these teachings freely to support clarity, stewardship, and responsible care. If this article was helpful, you may explore additional resources here:
MyHDiet.com — plant-based nutrition, enzymes, detox foundations
WipeOutToxins.com — toxin-free living and prevention
CleanseYourBlood.com — circulation and blood-flow support
HealthRetreat.com — Hallelujah Diet Health Retreat
AMPMForHealth.com — everyday wellness rhythms and curated tools
Thank you for being part of a community committed to thoughtful, responsible care.
