Excuse me, waiter, nobody here ordered diabetes.
Well, this should be interesting. One of us has to start following a diet suitable for someone with diabetes, while the other of us scoffs at what shows up on the meal plans for diabetics. Seriously, the day I count out 12 grapes for lunch is the day I quit eating grapes.
Add in conflicting and illogical data and you've got a headache...okay, I've got a headache. (tangent: Why isn't there a diet for migraines that works?) One site says eat a fair amount of carbs, listing things like wholemeal bread and brown rice as good things, while the next says wholemeal bread and brown rice have high glycemic indexes and thus should be eaten less. Then there are sentences like this:
The glycemic load measures the effect of the glycemic index of a food times its available carbohydrate content in grams in a standard serving.
To quote Chevy Chase, I understood there would be no math questions.
I wonder if Kalyn's Kitchen has crib sheets on how the whole glycemic index thing works...must go check...
Sigh.
After spending a bit less than a month paying attention to diet on a minute scale — see, I haven't just been cutting class, I've been busy — I've concluded that a few, relatively simple, changes take care of most of the changes we have to make. To wit:
- Portion size — Duh. Even though I've been using a scale to measure a lot of our food, I'm surprised at the portion size creep in some of what I cook. It's interesting, I am better at eyeballing baking ingredients than pasta. What's up with that? In addition, we're shaving a bit off of "standard portion sizes" and not noticing it much at all.
- Recipes — In case you haven't noticed, I'm not big on cooking from recipes for day-to-day meals. Those shelves full of books serve mostly as inspiration, baking books, and the occasional dish for special occasions. This does, however, make it extremely difficult to track nutritional data. At the moment, my copy of Master Chef is getting a workout, with many a meal being entered as a single dish because it's easier. I've decided I need new software; something that will track recipes and meals separately, allow me to define multiple users with their own nutritional profile and track their food over time, and with a huge database of foods (not recipes, ingredients, and if the list is expandable via some sort of database-like import, that's even better). If anyone has found something like this, please let me know.
- Less meat — We somewhat arbitrarily cut meat portions in half and haven't noticed it much at all. There's also a bit less red meat, but the trade-off is that, since we're buying less beef overall, we buy a good steak instead of a bunch of cheap burger.
- The kittens will be disappointed because there will be less leftover nummies, but they started mousing this week and we're nestled in a very sparsely populated fog valley that's strewn with streams, and thus critters.
- Snacks — Salty. Crunchy. Nutritional wasteland. But I'm not totally giving them up either. So we're back to portion sizes. someoneElse has taken to weighing a couple of servings of munchies in a bowl and bringing that out to where we're hanging out, rather than the old style of filling a bowl to what seemed like what we'd eat. We always did eat it, and it was usually more than we needed. We've found one brand of baked potato chips that isn't so bad and we're exploring our way through the "overpriced snacks" sections of stores...you know the section labeled "health food" or something. Luckily, we're not addicted to the salty, crunchy stuff so we can get along with a lot less easily.
- Chocolate — Speaking of things I'm not giving up. You can have my extra-dark chocolate when you pry it out of my cold dead fingers. The only real change here is that I am the only one eating it and I tend to do it when I am alone. Now don't worry, I'm not like some character out of The Lost Weekend sitting in a darkened house clutching a Hershey's extra dark bar. (Okay, every once in a while I feel like it, but so far I haven't done so.) Future chocolate purchases will adhere to the "buy less, buy better" rule, which should be fun.
When I consider the relatively modest dietary changes that we are making, I take heart in the knowledge that we haven't been eating badly, just a little more than we should at times. The upshot: my jeans are about a size looser and I really didn't notice it happening.
As for the blog, well I should be back for real now. (do I say that as often as Farmgirl says soon?) There's a new category (diabetes) for all things related to dealing with these changes. It should be an interesting journey (sort of like a pseudoReality tv show), because I truly am determined not to make large changes in our diet. There will be no surrender to the tyranny of grape-counting!
