Diabetes Direction

Introduction:
Diabetes mellitus or diabetes is a group of diseases, which is characterized by high glucose levels in blood stream because of defects in the body’s ability to either produce or use insulin for regulation of glucose. If you suffer from any type of diabetes, then it means there is an excess amount of sugar in your blood stream. Too much glucose can lead to serious health problems.

I know that we all know already that a healthy diet is good for us. Some of us pay a little more attention to what we eat, but it is an extremely difficult task to cut out the processed and unhealthy foods. While there are many people that don’t need to be concerned about weight, they still should be concerned about diet.

While we can’t force others to eat properly, we can have good foods around to encourage healthy eating. We can show how tasty the frowned upon vegetables can be, and a variety of ways they can be prepared. Same with protein and good fats!

I originally wrote much of the content of this post as a guest post for FYCNYC (Find Your Center) and then posted a version on Cooking Made Simple. I thought however, considering how appropriate this is for diabetics, it would be worth sharing here as well.

The lowly sweet potato seems to be often over-looked, and sometimes despised, in kitchens all across this country with the exception, perhaps, of the south where the more popular vegetable, in the form of sweet potato pie and other great dishes, has earned it’s rightful place. Sweet potatoes are, it should be noted, available and affordable almost everywhere.

I can hardly believe that we are already into November! Where has the time gone?! I am sorry for not posting sooner. There has been a lot of sickness around our family and I just haven’t been able to get to it until now.

How did everyone do surviving Halloween? I hope that the candy was sugar free and limited. We haven’t had many trick-or-treaters at our house in a number of years so this year we decided to not buy any candy at all. Our light was out and we didn’t have a single kid ring the bell. No expense, no candy for us to feel guilty for eating, and it was a quiet night at home.

We have found that breakfast really IS the most important meal of the day. Our blood sugar levels drop after eating and stay lower for the entire day, as long as we eat foods that we have tested before.

As the weather starts to cool down, my thoughts of food are switching to warmer meals and desserts, but I had another pie idea that I had to try. I don’t expect that I will give up making pies, but my focus will be more on soups, stews and chili.

This pie is also made with the store purchased graham cracker crust that is ready to go. The yummy part is made with sugar free cheesecake pudding, milk and a bit of heavy cream. I made two packages of pudding and used a cup less milk than it called for in order for the pie to be thick.

The past week I have been experiencing higher than normal blood glucose numbers. I have been testing more times than usual, trying to figure out if I was eating something that was causing the problem. I’ve been feeling a bit more stress recently as well as just generally being in a busier time. It seemed that no matter what I did my results wouldn’t stay down for long.

Summer is leaving us, going away for nearly a year for those of us that have different weather for different seasons. Our exercising usually changes as well. While the weather might not be the best for swimming under the sun, it is a beautiful time of the year and outdoor exercising can be just as fun and beneficial.

It is easy to excuse exercising for a day as our daily lives become busier and turn towards the holiday season. Before you know it there will be a reason that you can’t do it for a couple of days, and then you are back to being able to do less exercising…all that hard work being dropped to a lower level.

I’ve been playing with very quick and easy pies again! This was a fun and tasty one. I used a store bought graham cracker crust for my pie, but this does have a bit of sugar in it, so you might not want to use it. Feel free to substitute a different crust, or just make it without a crust at all if you like!

The bottom layer is made with sugar free banana cream pudding, the middle layer is sugar free white chocolate pudding, then some plain fresh whipped cream and dark chocolate shavings on top.

I’m sure this happens to all Diabetics, but sometimes I eat something that I haven’t had since becoming a diabetic, and it sends me on a spike to the moon! I have found something that will help bring this down. Pickle juice! Vinegar, actually. I can drink pickle juice much easier than I can drink plain vinegar though. For example, the other day I was very bad. I ate a couple of rice crispy treats, which I have loved since I was a child, and it did horrible things to my blood glucose. It shot up to 189! It is rare for me to go above 140 even on my worst days, so this was an eye opener, for sure. I knew that I wasn’t going to have good results from eating those sugary delicious treats, but I really didn’t expect it to go that high. Having experienced a drop from eating pickles before, I headed to the fridge and took a few good swigs of juice from the pickle jar. An hour later my blood sugar level was down to 95. That is more like it! I guess that I can no longer eat rice crispy treats. Especially not for breakfast! haha!