Living with diabetes > Introduce yourself

Just to say hello

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Maddie:
I haven't got my head round it all yet. The thought of having to write down everything I eat fills
me with dread. How do other people do it? Do they keep a diary? Do they write down everything they eat and then the glucose reading two hours after?

Also I would like to ask has anyone ever used coconut flour and coconut sugar?

pompeyv:
I discovered diabetes about 8 weeks ago,and this site pretty soon after  ;)

i've lost 16lb in the 8 weeks @2lb a week by 'low carbing' the first thing i did was read the blogs on here and then bought a meter, i discovered RICE will probably kill me ! so far rice and an orange are the only things that sent the meter into the stratosphere , i do test quite regular and i like to think i'm in control , i do keep a food diary as well but eat roughly the same stuff every day , so now know roughly whats good and whats not , as i've done this the testing isn't AS regular unless i eat something different , like last night i thought surely 200g of oven chips would be ok ? WRONG i'll never eat those again, i'll [well my mrs] will find an alternative lol

we decide a menu on a thursday and shop to it on friday its not really that hard once you have done it for a couple of weeks ..............i've discovered VEG and stuff as well and although there's carbs I seem ok on it .....................

Everyone is different though that much i have learnt  8)

Venomous:
pompey you may find sweet potato chips baked in the oven are a lower GI alternative. Delicious with cinnamon butter! They work for some people.. not for others!

Maddie if you find it hard to write it all down why not start with one meal of the day at first? You can take a fasting bg (on waking) then take your bg before breakfast, eat then take it again 1 hr after. For some low carb brekkies, see here ... http://loraldiabetes.blogspot.co.uk/2006/10/breakfasts.html

sedge:
Shedloads of low carb recipes in our recipe section anyway - in here AND shedloads more in the 'Archive Forum'.

Probably as far as diabetes goes, to begin with anyway - it's only the carbs that matter so I could tell you I've just had roast beef, an individual Yorkshire, cauliflower cheese (so the carbs in that would be approx 25% of 1 tablespoon of flour, plus an eyeful in the milk) a dollop of mashed potato and Bisto gravy.  One egg sized boiled spud is 10g of carb.  I had about 3.  One of Aunt Bessies bake them yourself Yorkshire puds is 7.7g.

So my diary just says 40g  (about 30g spud, another 7.7 for the Yorkshire and round it up for the gravy and sauce.)  I could have had about 3 other veg with that and not altered it all that much.

Pompey's plate of chips came in at 60g just for the chips!

There is a VERY good book with lots of pictures of food with their weights and the nutritional content, or you can get it as a App for Android or iPhone - called 'Carbs & Cals'.  Some of us also have the Collins Gem Calorie Counter book, which has no pix but gives values per 100g or 100ml.  So is useful for baking and making stuff yourself.  Anything you buy in a packet or tin will have the carbs per 100g on the label.  Often says 'half a tin is X grams weight so if you know it's eg 40g carb per 100g and half a tin (which you will eat) is 50g, you would therefore have 20g carb on your plate.

So you get a pair of digital kitchen scales you can Zero, bung your plate on it, zero it, chuck the spuds on, what do they weigh? and work it out from that.  If you do have mash, you will know which spoon you used and how many spoonfuls you put on the plate, say it's 3 ... so you now know 3 spoons of mash weighs whatever.  There are 16g of carbs in 100g of mash,   So multiply 16 by whatever the weight is.   Zero it again if you add anything else you need to count - eg parsnips!!!  (exclamation marks because they are crammed with carbs so are a danger area same as grapes, bananas and oranges .....)

If you come to my house for dinner and I serve you - you can look at the pile of mash I've given you and say -  is it more than I give myself which I know = 30g (or whatever it is) , or is it less? and assess whether to eat it all or not.  (Mainly I'd ask you to serve yourself anyway because you know how much you want and I don't!)

For this purpose, you can basically ignore any green veg and really most root veg aren't even that huge amounts in comparison to spuds and parsnips.

It all sounds terribly complicated but if you start with one meal, you'll soon find it isn't really.

nytquill17:
It does feel overwhelming at first.  It's basically a change of lifestyle - you now are required to do things you never had to bother with before, and I won't lie, it can be a pain at times.  It can fill you with dread, absolutely, it can feel very imposing.  It can make you feel resentful and angry, too, all sorts of things, all perfectly normal things to feel at this point.

But you are in a great position where if you go ahead and get to grips with it all now, you can head off a lot of problems down the line and other less pleasant things like medication.  You have insider information, after a fashion - you know that certain things are happening in your body that you need to react to, and you know ahead of when most people would find out (when they start having symptoms, which often means they have had full-blown diabetes for years before).

What I do now is just to mark the carb counts of what I eat, my blood sugar readings and whatever other information I know I will find useful.  I do test anywhere from 4-8 times a day, depending on how disciplined or not I am being, because I use insulin, so I need feedback on whether I'm taking the right amounts of insulin.  I can tell you that with time, all of these things - counting carbs, testing, keeping records - become habits just like brushing your teeth or washing your hands before dinner.  Nobody loves taking time out to brush their teeth or wash their hands but you get it over with and get back to your life, without feeling that all this personal hygiene is all you ever do anymore :)

In your case things may look a bit different from my situation - and perhaps more importantly things will be different for you in the early days than they will be later on.  Adapting to a managed-carb diet is more intense at first as you are trying lots of things and need LOTS of information to figure things out, and then it kind of settles into a nice comfortable routine where you mostly know what you're about and are kind of at a "maintenance" level later on.

The key is if you're feeling daunted, take just one piece at a time.  Maybe testing before and 2h after every single meal feels a bit much for you right now.  So pick just one meal to test for starters and work up to the rest gradually.  Maybe it's testing AND writing everything down in combination that feels too much.  So maybe you could test regularly but only record results every other day.  Then you can say "well I just have to do this for today, then I have the day off tomorrow."  Do small chunks like that, that feel doable to you, and keep at it until it feels second nature to you (it will!) then add the next step, and so on, until you're where you want to be.

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