Hello Roger - welcome to the family. We have a lot of people with first hand experience here in most any aspect of diagnosis or treatment that you can face. They will give you straight, honest answers to your questions and problems without trying to sell you anything like so many of the other websites do.

You will hear the nutrition and hydration mantra over and over while here; that's because it is so important. I ate pretty good over my treatment phase, but still lost 42 lbs overall. It's easy to lose too much weight during treatment and even post treatment. Sadly, you will likely lose your taste for food, or worse yet, food will taste bad. As you already know if something tastes bad you spit it out. If everything tastes bad you can easily get no nutrition or not enough nutrition, and significant weight loss is the result. I personally had days where I lost one pound plus in 24 hours. And it's not all fat loss, lean muscle loss comes into play pretty soon in treatment if you don't eat. I now have plenty of lose skin on both my legs and belly. It doesn't hang, but I can grab a handful of it easily.

Additionally, treatment can cause the mouth and throat to be sore, really sore. That just makes it that much harder to eat. Between bad tasting food and a really sore throat you can become mal-nourished quickly. If you reach that state they put you in the hospital with intravenous feeding. Worst thing of all radiation treatment stops while you are in the hospital, so your cancer can start growing again.

Cancer and it's treatment are calorie hogs; we use the term hyper-metabolic to describe it; your cancer eats about 1/3 of the calories you ingest, your treatment eats about 1/3, that means your body gets the other 1/3 for all it's metabolic functions. Talk about a pregnant woman needing to eat for two, well you need to eat for three.

I hope I have your attention. Now you know why nutrition and hydration are so important. Eat now, before the throat hurts, before you lose taste. Eat like a pig, eat everything, including dessert, at every meal. Try to put on weight. I promise you will lose it later, without even trying.

Stick with us, we will get you through this. Many have come before you and done well, you will too, but there will be rough patches along the way.

Tony