So much can change very quickly for your elderly family member as she ages, like her approach to eating. She may find suddenly that it’s difficult or even impossible for her to eat the way that she used to. Troubleshooting this situation and finding answers is absolutely vital.
Investigate the Possible Causes
You can’t find an answer to your elderly family member’s difficulty with eating if you don’t know what’s causing the problem. There could be any number of potential causes ranging from health issues and medication side effects to loneliness and a changing sense of taste. Whether the causes are physical, emotional, administrative, or a combination, you must drill down into what is contributing to her trouble with food and eating.
Address Medical Concerns with Her Doctor
If you’re finding that any of these causes are medical, including dental issues, then you need to loop in her medical providers. That’s going to help address these concerns in the best possible ways so that your elderly family member can move on to addressing other issues. In some cases, your elderly family member and her doctor may have to do additional testing to get to the root of what’s happening.
Look for Other Solutions that Make Sense
What other factors are at play? Your elderly family member may not have the energy to cook for herself, for instance. Or she might not be as physically active as she used to be. Solutions that can help, like working with home care providers to do the cooking for her, may be necessary. If the trouble your senior is having involves physically having trouble eating, personal care at home can help immensely.
Avoid Making This Stressful
The last thing that you want to do is to add stress to this entire process. Making this situation more complicated or adding to your elderly family member’s stress levels is only going to make it all worse. What you want to do is to find answers that are soothing, comforting, and useful for your elderly family member.
Keep Your Senior Involved in the Conversation
It’s also important that you keep your aging family member involved in this conversation and in the process of solving the issues you’re uncovering. This is her life, so she needs to have a say in the solutions that are implemented. It can be difficult to accept help from personal care at home, for example, but it’s a lot easier for her to do when she’s actively engaging in these decisions as well instead of being told this is how the problem is going to be solved.
It’s never easy to watch your senior have trouble with basic tasks like eating. If this is happening with your senior, it’s not a failure on your part as her family caregiver and it’s not something that she’s doing to make life more complicated for everyone. There are things that you can try to help her, it just might require getting some outside assistance to get the right solution in place.
Source
https://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/features/maintaining-appetite
If you or an aging loved one is considering personal care at home in Billings, MT, call the caring staff at SYNERGY Home Care of Billings today. 406-839-2390
