Two visits ago, my diabetic educator said it was time to work on finding target foods that were going to make my sugar go crazy and happy dance all the way to numbers unknown. Cool, okay... Then she said how we do this is, you write down everyyyyyyyyything you eat at every meal and snack. Not cool, so not okay. I wasn't good at diary writing when I was a girl kid and was supposed to love, love, love putting down all my happy thoughts (on good days) and all my angst (mom said no, dad took her side, my friend at school didn't like my outfit today!) thoughts. However, the diary when I was ten wasn't going to help me live longer, this one would...yeah, okay. Not cool but I get it.
Instead of taking my blood sugar every morning before nary a bite of anything has been eaten, I choose a meal and two hours after I eat it, I take my blood sugar. The goal being that if the sugar spike that naturally occurs after eating, hasn't come back down to some semblance of normal (my new normal, ya know the sweet kind), then one of the foods I ate may be a trigger food for me and I might need to avoid it. Armed with all this new information...I swear, if you are diabetic, go go go to your educator. I learn something every month and there is someone to listen to my concerns that KNOWS what should and should not be happening. It is invaluable to anyone trying to manage this disease. Plus, it helps keep you accountable. It's hard to eat crazy bad for you foods and then go talk about it! Anyway, so I set off with my Dear Food Diary plan. It was a month of tediousness, let me tell you. I tend to be a little OCD about stuff...where things are placed on my desk, the straightness of my folder stack...this was no different. I just couldn't stand not to stop and write down every little teensy thing at the very moment it happened and it was SO inconvenient. I did not enjoy it. But, and this is such a big but...I learned a lot. About my eating habits, about the things that affect my choices...PMS? YES! Must have DONUT! Tired, stressed? YES! Must have CHOCOLATE! I'm an idiot. My food choices are so often guided by things not even partly related to food. I didn't resist all temptations but at least I can, and am, more readily identifying the moments when my choices are being driven not be hunger and need but by some other influence...be it internal or external.
I didn't identify any food triggers, so that was really good. I did identify, that for my best after dinner blood sugar, I really need to take my medication a bit earlier in the evening. I had mostly good eating choices and had my first really normal, as in normal for all folks not just for diabetic people, blood sugars...which read below 100 several times! I was really happy about that and so were my kidneys and various other body parts. They didn't thank me, but I'm sure it's true. So off I went back to the diabetic cheerleader lady with my pink food diary and all my information, gleefully celebrating the end of writing all that stuff down!
Oh wait...there's more? Oh, of course there is! You know it wasn't that easy. She was very pleased with my progress. My overall average blood sugar was down almost 20 points! That was really excellent news. I lost a little more weight, another plus. So I'm clipping right along with this management business. All the more reason to think I was free and clear of this diary thing. She wasn't on my plan...and I couldn't persuade her with my whining about how UNfun it was...I did try. She said she wanted me to continue the food diary with an added bonus. At the end of the month I need to go back and highlight, ugh...highlight (really???), all the not good, UNbest, really bad food choices that I made. So for those of you paying attention...I get to highlight DONUT and CHOCOLATE and all the other stupid stuff. I understood immediately the point of the exercise. A continuation of helping the person (in this case, falling off the wagon donut snacking ME) making the choices, to choose more wisely. When it's there in black and white you cannot ignore what you've done. Oh sure, you could not write stuff down but what would be the point in that?! Is the new assignment helping me pick better? I wish I could say 100% of the time that was true but that would be a 100% big fat lie! There are some foods I've given up and I don't miss them (or rarely miss them, and not enough to have them) but there are some things that I love like a fat girl loves donuts...oh wait, that IS what I love. Those aren't so easily banished forever. It's a work in progress and I bet in 10 years or 30 years it will still be a work in progress. Cause I still like food, I still think chocolate is a vegetable, and I still think the calories fall out of the donut hole. But I'm controlling it, the choices, the sugar, the whole kit 'n caboodle! Maybe my highlighter won't run out of ink...
No links this time, go back to some of those other links in past posts and find a good recipe that will make a good for me donut...will ya!?
