Most live-in carers stay with a client for a set period of time before taking a break. Often you will find yourself doing a rota of three or four weeks at a time, with another carer taking over while you have a break.

While it is great to return and find things as you have left them, occasionally you may see that things have changed – and not for the best.

Diet is one of the things that you may find changed on your return. In fact, you may come back and find that your client no longer fits into their clothes!

What is the solution?

Hopefully if you have been away for only a few weeks, your client may not be too overweight in that short time. Nevertheless, it is a worrying situation to find that clothing does not fit comfortably anymore.

Overweight brings additional problems to general health of your client, as well as mobility issues with carrying extra weight.

It may not be the most tactful thing to approach the outgoing carer about this. Rather, try approaching the family first.

A tactful discussion about limiting cakes and cookies and keeping calories a little lower may be a subject that they would like to discuss but feel uncomfortable in doing.

You may suggest to the family that a diet/calorie reduced plan be discussed and set in place. You will need to consider your client’s activity level and the daily calorie intake.

There may be some areas where calories can be reduced such as cutting out that extra piece of cake, reducing sugar on cereal and only cooking enough for one meal so that second helpings are avoided.

Once a nutrition plan has been set up and is in place, your next obstacle is to introduce it to the offending carer – no mean feat. However, if you have the support of the family or your agency, this can be done with the least amount of offense.

You may want to introduce it to the second carer simply as a new set of food and mealtime guidelines as suggested by the agency or family. This way it removes you from the scene and places the decision making on other people who are in charge.

Once you have set a new routine in place, ask the family to remove all the offensive foods. Don’t leave them in the house ‘to be finished up’ because you can rest assured that the next carer will simply replace them, and you will have the same problem when you arrive back!

Final thoughts

Diet and nutrition are always important and while we never want to leave our clients hungry, it is important to their health and wellbeing that we keep to a nutritious diet.

This is not to say that there will never be any treats, because it is possible to keep things in moderation and still have a happy client.

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